Finding Emilie

by Laurel Corona

  The dense mass of leaves formed a a roof over a dirt floor covered with pulverized rock. Voltaire was seated in one of a pair of chairs upholstered in red and gold brocade, set next to a wood-inlaid table on which lay a stack of letters. An oil lamp cast light to read by in the deep shade. To one side, a small secretarial desk and chair sat on a worn Persian carpet. If she could ignore the tree trunk in the middle, Lili thought, all that would be needed to complete the impression of being indoors were a few paintings hanging from the clipped hedge.

  “Welcome to my hideaway,” Voltaire said, motioning to a lap robe covering his legs. “I hope you aren’t offended if I don’t get up.” He was wearing a loose coat that looked more like a dressing gown, and on his head was a scarlet turban onto which three or four caps in various colors had been perched. He was not wearing his wig, and fragile-looking wisps of white hair lay in unkempt straggles around his neck, but his eyes gleamed, untouched by sallowness or clouds.

  “Do you remember the last line of my Candide?” he asked. “How he finally gives up his illusions that this is the best of all possible worlds, and decides that the only thing to do is to cultivate his own garden.” He gestured around the clearing. “I guess you could say that’s what I’ve done here.” He gave her a wan smile. “I need asylum from my asylum. Everyone knows to leave me alone here, or else I’ll write something truly wicked about them.”

  “I’m afraid—for reasons I haven’t yet told you—that I’ve fallen sadly behind in my reading in the last year,” Lili said. “Except for the Bible, of course.” She made a face to ensure he knew such limitations had not been by choice.

  “Ah yes,” he said. “I must warn you that the bread you eat here will not be at all what the Lord commanded, though we have plenty of the main ingredient.” Seeing Lili’s puzzled look, he went on. “Take—what was it? Wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet?—and mix them together, and make bread with it. It sounds like something I’d rather feed my goats, but here’s the thing God says will make it really special.” He gave her a sly grin. “‘And thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man.’”

  “No!” Lili’s mouth dropped open, and she made no attempt to close it.

  “It’s right there,” Voltaire cackled. “I’m afraid I’m not one of those who carries a Bible around like a third testicle, so you’ll have to wait to check, but you can read Ezekiel chapter four in Latin, Greek, French, or English in my library.”

  “Dung?” Lili hadn’t heard him.

  He snickered. “‘In our sight,’ the Good Lord says, so we’ll all know exactly what we’re eating. But remember, God is known for his mercy. He said it would be all right to use cow dung instead. But he was firm on the rest—eat it for three hundred and ninety days and not one day less.” He grinned. “Aren’t you lucky you arrived on day three hundred and ninety-one? But perhaps that explains why the guests are so unpleasant to be around.”

  “Eat dung? I’m not sure whether I want to laugh or cry.”

  “Exactly,” Voltaire replied. “That’s why religion is the vilest form of infamy. Can you imagine some poor soul, wondering why he is afflicted with gout, or whose drinking water is killing his children, thinking the remedy is to take Ezekiel’s advice about what will make God stop punishing him? Although I suppose we deserve whatever we’re willing to believe.”

  He looked away with a bemused smile, remembering something. “Many years ago, I was living above a tavern with about ten other boarders, and the chaise percée sat over a pipe that went down past the tavern into—well, who knows?—somewhere underground. I was arrested for having written something treasonous, and the officer thought I was hiding copies in my room. I told him I had thrown my work down the privy, and do you know what that brainless toad did?”

  Voltaire didn’t wait for a reply. “He went looking for it! By the time he was done, the pipe had burst and sprayed the people all over the tavern. And it was just about then, when he was standing covered in piss and shit—including mine—that he figured out there weren’t any papers there at all.”

  “He never found them?”

  Voltaire cackled. “I never put them there. I wanted to punish him for being in thrall to a government that would arrest me for writing what I thought.”

  Lili shook her head slowly, marveling at his audacity.

  “Why are you here?” Voltaire asked in a suddenly solemn voice.

  “How nice it is to have forgotten for a little while,” Lili said, taken aback by the change in subject.

  Voltaire rested one bony hand on his chest and massaged his chin with the other as he listened without comment to her story about her impending marriage and her trip to Cirey. “We shall have to think of something,” he said when she had finished. Setting aside the lap robe, he got slowly to his feet. “Would you like to take a walk? It always helps clear my mind.”

  “Perhaps I could stay here at Ferney for a while,” Lili thought aloud, as they walked in the direction of a little church she had noticed on the grounds. “I can copy in a good hand, and Madame Denis might like to be relieved of some of the burdens of the house …” She saw a smirk flit across Voltaire’s face at the mention of the corpulent niece who called herself his housekeeper but whose two burdens seemed to consist of ensuring personally that there was no food left uneaten at any meal and making Monsieur de La Harpe feel witty. “It would be temporary, of course,” Lili added, “but it would keep me from having to go back to Paris in a few days and choose a husband.”

  “Nothing would be more charming, my dear,” Voltaire replied, stopping at the gate to the churchyard. “But it would be best if your name did not become associated with mine. Although with the gossip-mongering that goes on in this house, it may already be too late for that.” He stopped to look at her. “Besides, I think the solution to your problem may be right under your nose. You just haven’t seen it yet.”

  Lili opened her mouth to ask what he meant, but he was already pointing to an inscription above the door of the church. “Deo erexit Voltaire.” he said. “Do you know what that means?”

  “Voltaire erected this to God,” Lili replied.

  “That’s what it says, but what does it mean?” Voltaire was too impatient to wait for her to think. “It means that I did it to honor God, not to snivel before some saint the church tells us will have a chat with God on our behalf.”

  “You built a church?” The incongruity was so great that it pushed all other thoughts to the back of her mind.

  “Not exactly,” he said with a rueful look. “I rebuilt a church. I thought the old parish church spoiled the view, and since it was on my property I tore it down. I figured nobody would mind. After all, I was building a new one with my own money just a few paces away for all the poor cannibals of this village who believe they can’t live—or I guess can’t die is more like it—without a taste of their Savior’s flesh and blood every week. But the bishop decided to punish me for not asking his permission by insisting that I build the new one right where the old one was. So yes, my dear Lili, your friend Voltaire built a church.”

  He looked around. “It’s a shame Father Adam isn’t here at the moment. I’d like you to meet him. He’s my other revenge besides the inscription. Adam’s been defrocked, but he says mass anyway, and it makes me feel a bit better that the people who use my property for such foolishness at least aren’t being lied to in sermons quite as badly as they might be by a priest who actually believes all that nonsense.”

  By now they had reached the other side of the church, where the land fell away in a gentle slope, revealing vineyards, pastures, orchards, and fields of vegetables and grains. “This is what I live for now,” Voltaire said. “I’m rich, you know—the château, and the town and all the land around it belong to me. I can’t think of a better use for my money than to make this little bit of France a better place. When I bought Ferney, the land was too marshy to cultivate. Now the marshes are drained and there are new farms. There’s a watchmaking factory, and
other new businesses that bring income to the village. Life is better now—more orderly, cleaner, safer. I’ve given up on changing the world but I can change this.” His face flushed with pleasure. “We must cultivate our garden, you know.”

  He took a quick look back toward the château. “We should go,” he said. “It must be almost time for dinner.” His laugh was gleeful. “Good thing I’ve trained everyone to wait.”

  “Would you mind if I borrowed a copy of Candide while I’m here?” Lili asked, taking his arm as they turned back. “I’m feeling dreadfully ignorant.”

  The old man smiled. “I would be most pleased. But there’s something else I think you should read first.”

  EMILIE DU Châtelet stopped writing for a moment as she felt the baby move inside her. She rested her hand on her bulging stomach. Only three months now. Work on the Principia was going well, and she had time to write something else. She wasn’t sure why she felt driven to write down her personal philosophy when there wasn’t even enough time to deal with weightier things. A little piece, this “Discourse on Happiness” admittedly was, not even meant for publication, although of course when she was dead, she wouldn’t care what happened to it.

  “People commonly think it is difficult to be happy, and many reasons can be shown to justify this belief,” she had written a few days before. “But the truth is that it would be much easier to be happy if people tended toward self-reflection, and if a plan of conduct preceded their actions.”

  Voltaire would be interested in reading what followed, although there wasn’t anything she said that they hadn’t discussed at one point or another. “It’s up to us to make our passions serve our happiness”—surely he would find no argument in that, although he might be displeased at how frankly she had written about the end of their affair and the pain the loss of his affections had caused her. Saint-Lambert as well—he should get a copy, since the misery he’d left in his wake had certainly helped to hone her thinking.

  “It isn’t enough simply not to be unhappy. Life would not be worth the trouble if absence of dolor were the only goal. Truly, non being would be preferable, since assuredly that is the state in which we suffer the least. It’s necessary, instead, to strive to be happy.”

  Her dear friend Duke Stanislas would understand that. He, more than anyone, knew how to make the effort required to live well. No wonder her friends would rather spend time at his provincial court at Lunéville than at Versailles. Once she was a little further along in her work on the Principia, she would be leaving Paris to go to Lunéville with a few companions to help her through her lying-in and the birth of her child.

  A fourth copy for one of those friends, Marie-Victoire du Thil, who so many years ago had insisted on stopping by Voltaire’s boardinghouse so she could taunt him with being the second-most-intelligent person in Paris. How different her life would be if she had never met him!

  “We are made happy in the present not just by the pleasures we experience at the moment, but by our hopes for the future and our reminiscences of the past,” she wrote. “Appropriate self-love in contemplating these things is the wind that fills our sails, and without which our ship could not move forward.” It was good to feel she had done well with the life God had given her. Though she doubted her future, the desire to speak from beyond the grave was more than wind filling a sail. It was a bellowing gale that made the rigging scream.

  A new friend, Julie de Bercy, would be accompanying her to Lunéville as well. Being so young and with so much to learn, perhaps she would like to read it too. Baronne Lomont of course would not. Now there was someone whose goal in life seemed to be quite the opposite of happiness, rejecting joy and pleasure with dour sanctimony, like a magnet repelled by the force of another. Baronne Lomont would be at Lunéville too, having invited herself as insurance that no one enjoyed themselves too much.

  Emilie shrugged. “It would be better to figure out how to be happy in the situation we face than try to change it,” she wrote. The trick was to be happy whatever one’s lot. Baronne Lomont was her sister-in-law, her husband’s brother’s widow, and since there was no way to rid her life of such a grim-faced bore, she should endure her company as best she could.

  Emilie would keep a copy of her “Discourse on Happiness” for herself, of course, and have one more made, in case she had forgotten someone. She felt as if she had. Whoever it was would come to her in time, and then she would offer up her little work, in bound leather with a ribbon for her to keep her place, as if she had intended to give the book to her from the beginning.

  Her place? Emilie thought for a moment. Why was she sure the person she’d forgotten was a woman?

  The baby moved again. “Quiet now,” she said. “Maman has to write.”

  1767

  HOW COULD Voltaire be so cruel? Lili set the ribbon at her place and put the book down. It would be better to figure out how to be happy in the situation she faced than try to change it? The happiest people were those who desired the least change in their lot? How could her mother say such terrible things, and why would Voltaire want her to know she had? Her mother wasn’t happy with her lot, and she hadn’t just gone along …

  My mother is a hypocrite! The thought stung, as surely as if it had stood up and slapped her.

  “Beg pardon, mademoiselle.” Lili heard Justine’s voice behind her. “You’ll be late to supper if you don’t go down.”

  “Please say I’m indisposed,” Lili said. Please say I think I’m suffocating. “I’ll ask for a tray later if I’m hungry.”

  The dining room was directly below her bedchamber, and she could hear the guests being seated. Madame Denis’s and Voltaire’s voices were the easiest to pick out, but La Harpe was there too, as were a man she assumed was Father Adam and a woman who must be La Harpe’s phantom wife finally up from her bed. The sounds of silverware clinking against plates and the jocular conversation, lubricated by the tasty wine from Voltaire’s estate, rose up to Lili’s room.

  Lili didn’t hear. The book compelled her to open it again. “The foremost thing is to be well decided about what one wants to be and what one wants to do,” her mother had written.

  As Lili read on, the words jumped out at her as if they had been shot from cannons. Shaken, she put down the book again and went to the window. She had been wrong about what her mother had meant. She isn’t saying to accept Baronne Lomont’s ideas for my life, Lili realized. She’s saying the opposite—that I can’t expect to be happy if I do. She’s telling me to be who I am. That’s the lot I can’t change.

  The first boom of thunder from a summer storm crackled in the sky, and she felt the cool, charged air on her face. “Who I am—that’s the lot I can’t change,” she repeated aloud.

  A sudden gust of wind rattled the pages of the open book and she picked it up again. “Without knowing yourself, there can be no real happiness,” she read. “You’ll swim perpetually in a sea of uncertainty; you’ll destroy in the morning what you made the evening before; you’ll pass your life making stupid mistakes that you will then try to repair or repent.”

  Don’t be afraid of what you want. How can you be happy without the courage to acknowledge your dreams? Her mother’s message burned through her so personally that at any moment Lili thought she might turn the page and see her name. Set your sights on what you can hope to have and do not settle for less, she was telling her. Unreasonable hopes will make you miserable, but reasonable ones can shape your life, if you have the courage to listen to them.

  Lili was sure she felt the soft whisper of a woman’s voice. “Don’t give up now,” it said. “Go find out who you are, and then you will know what you need.”

  GERMOND STOOD ON the far side of the salon, just outside Voltaire’s bedroom. He bowed stiffly to Lili as she approached.

  “Is he all right?” she asked, holding the note Louise had delivered to her bedroom the following morning.

  “Quite, I’m sure,” Germond said. “But rainy nights in the summer always l
eave his chest feeling tight, and he believes it wise to stay in bed the next day. One can’t be too careful, you know.”

  “I hear you out there!” Voltaire called from his bedchamber. “Bring Mademoiselle du Châtelet in!”

  He was sitting up in bed, wearing a thin muslin nightshirt and a length of soft, cream-colored wool that had been wrapped several times around his head and secured with a twist and a tuck at the crown. His coffee and a crust of bread had been pushed aside on his lap tray in favor of the Parisian journal he had been reading.

  “How are you feeling, Monsieur Voltaire?” Lili asked, approaching the bed.

  “One never knows,” he said, holding his thin fingers to his chest. “These summer storms create miasmas that can bring the most dreadful diseases into the house. I shall keep my head warm”—he patted his turban—“and be quiet as a mouse all day, and perhaps nothing will find me.” He gave her a toothless grin. “I thought perhaps you might be willing to sit with me for a while. We’re too far from Paris for tongues to wag about you being in my bedroom.”

  He looked toward the door. “Germond!” The valet was immediately in the doorway. “Bring mademoiselle some breakfast.”

  Before she could sit down, Voltaire pointed to a painting on the wall opposite his bed. A rosy-cheeked woman in a blue, ermine-trimmed gown looked out with an expression that was at once haughty and slightly mischievous. “Do you recognize her?”

  Lili moved toward the portrait. “My mother?” She turned back to see him nodding.

  “Marianne Loir caught her spirit,” he said. “And her beauty. It’s my favorite portrait of her.”

  Lili stood, taking in every detail. “I’ve never seen anything larger than a miniature,” she said, “and that only once.” She leaned in to look more closely. “What color was her hair? I can’t tell with the dusting of powder.”