The most striking things about the château were its modest size (Voltaire’s home at Ferney is even smaller) and its rather odd shape. The house belonged to Emilie’s husband’s family, and he apparently didn’t mind his wife living with her lover there, because Voltaire was using his own money to expand and refurbish the house. I guess they considered it a fair trade! The château looks half-finished in some ways. It has a second story that goes only halfway across the main part of the house, and the last wing in the architectural plans was never built. This sense of a work in progress added to the feeling that at any moment Voltaire or Emilie might come bursting through the door to see who’s come for a visit.
The owner of the house gave me a private tour before the summer season, when it is open to the public, and told me that the few tourists who visit are mostly American or Korean. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that most know little to nothing about Emilie. They come because they want to see the house where Voltaire lived, close enough at the time to the French border so he could escape in a hurry from the law. Perhaps now that readers are “finding” Emilie, the purpose of visits to Cirey will change!
Why did you decide to include the tales of Meadowlark and Tom in the narrative? At what point did you write these adventures?
I hadn’t originally intended to use these stories so extensively, but when I got about fifty pages into the first draft, I realized that the story I saw ahead was really quite dark. I decided I needed to lighten it up both for myself as I wrote, and eventually for the reader as well. I saw the Meadowlark stories both as comic interludes and as a means of watching Lili grapple with the concerns of each stage of her life.
Lili spends time with the Comte de Buffon and Jean-Etienne in the Jardin de Roi, the king’s garden, in Paris. Did such a place actually exist? What was its purpose?
It is very much there, renamed the Jardin des Plantes after the French Revolution. It is bigger than in Buffon’s day, but still laid out essentially the same. Its original purpose, medical research, is still honored by some plantings in the area where I imagined Jean-Étienne’s garden, but for most visitors, it’s a pleasant place for a stroll, ringed by museums and the Paris zoo.
In the novel you write that some of Voltaire’s published ideas, in fact, came from Emilie du Châtelet. Were you aware of this aspect of the philosopher and his work, or did it come as a surprise to you? To what extent did Emilie contribute to Voltaire’s work?
I was not aware that Voltaire took himself very seriously as a scientist. He saw recognition as a man of science as adding to, or surpassing, the status he could gain as a man of letters. Most scholars now are comfortable with attributing the difficult and complex scientific thinking in his papers to Emilie. In the case of any collaboration where conflicting claims of authorship are made, the simplest way to sort it out is to ask what each accomplished independently of the other. In Voltaire’s case, he produced no work as a scientist before or after he lived with Emilie. Emilie was the only one of the two who had spent years studying the sciences and mathematics before they met, and she went on, after their relationship became more distant, to produce her greatest works without his help.
One of Newton’s laws of physics states that an object at rest will remain at rest unless an external force is applied to it. What was the force that set you on the path to novel writing?
What sent me off on a different trajectory (and at much greater speed) was my experience writing my first full-length book, Until Our Last Breath (St. Martin’s Press 2008). I had written a number of shorter books for younger readers, and I felt very comfortable moving up to the length and scope of the new book, but I was unhappy with the constraints of the genre of narrative non-fiction. Having to accept the limitations of known facts was a constraint I wasn’t comfortable with, because I think the truth is sometimes better served by a mix of imagination and research. I wanted to be creative about filling in what no one thought to document, and historical fiction is the perfect way to do that.
On your website, you state: “My goal as a historical novelist is to provide … the reader with high-quality fiction about women and the forgotten and undervalued roles they played in their societies.” Why is sharing the stories of women in particular something you’re inspired to do?
I have always asked, “where were the women?” when learning about any historical era. There were so many of us, and I don’t believe for a minute we were nearly as invisible, or as limited in our roles, as most histories would suggest. It makes more sense that our stories have been forgotten than that they were never there to be told. Women of every era I have researched were far more adventurous, intellectual, heroic, and accomplished than we have been led to believe. We have to make a choice whether to accept that women’s stories won’t be told because we lack sufficient facts, or tell them anyway, using our imaginations and our ability to make strong inferences from what is known. There’s a difference between the facts and the truth, and when the facts are not known, the truth must served by fiction, or not be told at all.
Why do you think historical fiction is so popular with readers?
People today are so busy, and they want to get high value out of what little discretionary time they have. Good historical fiction is by nature a “smart read,” because one is learning about people, places, and events in the past within the context of a compelling story. Historical fiction, in the hands of an author who takes the factual foundation of his or her work seriously, is the perfect illustration of Horace’s ancient adage, that literature should both delight and instruct.
What time period will you be exploring in your next book?
My next novel is set in Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth century. People know the year 1492 because of Columbus, but many do not know that several other momentous events involving Ferdinand and Isabella also happened that year. The first was the fall of the Muslim Caliphate of Granada and the end of centuries of Muslim political presence in Iberia. The second was the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. My novel covers the period from Henry the Navigator in Portugal, to Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain, from the point of view of a Jewish woman who is witness to those tumultuous times.
Finding Emilie Page 43
