The Elixir of Immortality

by Gabi Gleichmann

  Shoshana’s expression made it plain how demeaning she considered the request. Her face lost color and she dropped her gaze. She clearly felt uncomfortable looking Baptiste de Gendre in the eye. Everyone in the hall tensely awaited her answer. It seemed an eternity before she began to speak.

  “Unfortunately, I must decline,” she replied in a low voice. “This is a matter of conscience for me.” She explained that she felt called to devote her life to the study of the mysteries of nature; she wished to apply scientific methods, search out truths, and understand the workings of the world.

  “The greatest attribute of a researcher is the willingness to question,” she said. “This means not falling prey to the prejudices and pet theories of the day. For that reason I am skeptical of sweeping explanations of the world, models that answer all questions and solve all problems. We should be willing to challenge them.”

  She paused for a moment and looked around the hall.

  “Scientific inquiry cannot prosper when an unknown God is accorded unchallenged dominion over the world. I reject the concept of God as a king of kings asserting a predominant role in the realm of science. For me, God is only a word, and I cannot swear to something in which I do not believe.”

  Baptiste de Gendre clutched his hands to his head and exclaimed, “No human being, and certainly no serious man of science, can deny the existence of nature’s Creator—”

  Shoshana did not let him elaborate; she immediately cut him off. “No man of science can be so blind and witless as to assert that our knowledge of God is based on science.”

  Pierre Delpech, author of important articles explaining magnetism, spoke up. “Mademoiselle Spinoza is presumptuous enough to believe that she can correct Newton’s theory of energy. That may be a sign of youthful error and entirely fallacious reasoning. But denying the existence of God is a crime. She should be punished.”

  Alain Gaillard, the youngest of the four physicists, seemed to lose control completely. He stood up, jabbed his index finger at Shoshana, and shouted angrily that the Jewess was calling into question the very basis of the organization of society as well as the king’s sovereign power, and she should be locked away in the Bastille for it. Regaining his calm somewhat but nevertheless addressing her in an insulting tone, he declared that the individual standing before the company of physicists was no man of science; she was a Jewish witch.

  The other three physicists exchanged amused glances. Spontaneous applause broke out in the hall and there were a few scattered whistles. Seething with anger, Voltaire shook his head.

  Gaillard’s words had not yet sunk in entirely, but Shoshana knew that the examination was finished. She heard an inner voice saying, You will never be admitted to the world of science. She realized that she was being judged according to rules made by elderly men and had been condemned in advance—for being young, for being female, and for being a Jew, but also and especially because she had dared to question conventional wisdom. She felt helpless, and everything seemed pointless. She suddenly understood, even though just a few moments earlier she had imagined herself upon the threshold of a new life, that the most rational thing she could do was give up. It stung her deeply to see the self-satisfied expressions and glaring faces of the four physicists. Their thoughtless trampling of her soul horrified her. A slap in the face would have caused less pain. She turned away to shield herself.

  President Ferry knew that upon an earlier occasion Gaillard had let slip certain comments that betrayed a deep dislike for Jews. Ferry said he did not wish to criticize his colleague, but Professor Gaillard was perhaps a touch too demonstrative in his behavior. He was very careful to maintain a neutral tone. Like all other men of standing, he knew how important it was to maintain control of a meeting. In order to keep the assembly from descending into chaos, he declared, entirely on his own initiative and without asking for the agreement of the four physicists, that Shoshana Spinoza’s treatise could in no circumstances be approved by the academy. He gave no rationale for his decision.

  Jubilation broke out in the audience. The four physicists applauded long and hard. Only a few of the younger students expressed displeasure at Ferry’s conclusion. D’Alembert sat in his place of honor, looking extremely concerned.

  SHOSHANA AND VOLTAIRE immediately left the hall. They began to walk aimlessly through the galleries of the Louvre. Shoshana felt a shudder rack her body. She stopped short, closed her eyes, and gasped for air.

  Her mother had arranged for a modest reception in her apartment and invited a number of guests to celebrate her daughter’s day of triumph. Shoshana could not face the prospect of seeing all those people. She was despondent. So she told Voltaire she wanted to take a carriage to his residence in the rue Faubourg Saint-Germain.

  UPON THEIR ARRIVAL there, Voltaire suggested a glass of wine and did what he could to make her feel better. He acknowledged that perhaps it had been naïve of him to suppose that those physicists of the old school would embrace her conclusions. The very existence of the results of her research threatened their understanding of the physical world and its fundamental principles. Moreover, the language of her treatise was aesthetically very pleasing, certainly something not appreciated by those with no ear for the musicality of the French language. Voltaire declared that he was convinced, however, that he had judged the work correctly. For that reason he intended to send it to an Italian professor of physics at the University of Bologna, a place more open to ideas and therefore more propitious to the discussion of new concepts.

  Shoshana was glad to have his support. She felt an eerie presence seeping into the room, and the wine had set her blood racing. She rose and approached Voltaire where he sat comfortably on his chaise longue. She brought her bosom within inches of his face, unhooked her bodice, pulled down her camisole, and exposed her small breasts. His face lit with surprise and desire at the sight of them. He stared, enchanted, as they trembled with anticipation. He inhaled the intoxicating, alluring fragrance of her youth. His heart began pounding and his long-somnolent manhood slowly but surely began to awaken. He was surprised, for he had thought himself no longer capable of movement in those nether regions. He sensed that he would be able to deliver the pleasure her body was longing for. Ever so carefully, he began to caress her breasts. He brushed her lips and then her neck, and his hand glided over her hips. He bent forward and closed his lips about her left nipple, kissed it, and sucked at it. Few teeth remained in his mouth; he was as gentle as an infant. She thrilled to the touch of his gums upon her breast and felt the warm wetness welling up in her sex. He pulled her down upon the chaise, removed her dress, and carefully took his position on top of her. His face convulsed, he moaned, he pushed his penis into her and thrust it deep. “Careful!” he said, more to himself than to her, because this was what she wanted more than anything in the world. For a few fleeting moments their bodies rocked slowly back and forth.

  Once they had possessed each other, she was the most deliriously happy woman in the world. Voltaire helped her lace her dress once more and then sent her home in a carriage to her mother.

  THE NEXT MORNING a letter from the great philosopher was delivered to Shoshana at their residence. She scanned it with her heart in her mouth. Voltaire wrote that he was appalled by what had happened. He regretted his own weakness and was ashamed he had allowed burning desire to confuse his emotions and overcome his reason. Although the thoughtless deed had lasted but a few moments, it was a most unfortunate occurrence. He apologized for his unbecoming behavior; rutting like a wild animal was completely inappropriate conduct for a man of his age and position. He proposed they should mutually agree to forget the whole matter and refrain for the time being from any contact with each other.

  Shoshana became distraught. She read the letter at least ten times but refused to accept its message. She took to her bed and tried to relive the brief joy she had experienced the previous day in Voltaire’s arms. She caressed her breasts and rubbed the cleft between her legs, rousing hers
elf into a hot sweat. Her body shook. She could not tell if she was quivering with erotic ecstasy or with an agony of self-loathing.

  After a while she seated herself before her mirror. She looked deeply into the face reflected there and saw a total stranger. She had never seen that face before, and it frightened her. The expression in its eyes was anguished, confused, and deeply distressed. That could not be her own face; it had to belong to someone else, to some unknown woman. She desperately desired to free herself from the face of that unhappy stranger. Finding it impossible to wish away that strange woman, Shoshana smashed the mirror.

  SHOSHANA SLEPT for only a couple of hours, then collected herself sufficiently to draft a frantic letter to Voltaire. She begged him to receive her. She emphatically refused to separate herself from the very being who most inflamed her passions.

  The letter came back an hour later, unopened.

  Over the course of the following two weeks she sent eighteen letters to the philosopher. Each consisted of only three words: I love Thee.

  All were returned. Voltaire did not read a single one.

  IT WAS UNBEARABLY HUMILIATING for Shoshana to see the man she loved turn his back on her. She sank into a deep depression, convinced that her life was completely meaningless. She lost all appetite and subsisted on nothing but tea. She grew increasingly thin and feeble. Her cheeks were hollow and her eyes were sunken.

  GILBERT, THEIR ELDERLY SERVANT, could see by Shoshana’s sorrowful face that the failure of her relationship with Voltaire had devastated her. He tried to console her. He assured her she had no better friend than the great philosopher. Voltaire was wise, a man of great experience; he had seen almost everything there was to see; he could give her excellent advice. But, after all, he was seventy-two years old. Shoshana should be content to have a father such as he, but no woman in her right senses could imagine that Voltaire as a lover. It was useless to dream of him. Gilbert, a Breton who had grown up on the Atlantic coast, likened it to an attempt to swim into breaking waves that constantly tossed one back against the rocky crags of the coast. These were words of wisdom, but Shoshana refused to heed them.

  THE BRIGHT LIGHT of autumn flooded into Shoshana’s room, but she felt that she had entered a shadow world.

  She lacked the will to live. She wished simply to wither and die.

  In November she discovered that she was pregnant.

  Gilbert counseled Madame Spinoza to feed her daughter apple sections in sugar syrup to keep her alive. She fed Shoshana with a spoon, but Shoshana vomited it all up.

  That December was unusually cold. Large snowflakes drifted down from the skies, and the streets of Paris were covered with icy slush. The winter weather spoke to Shoshana of frozen dreams and hopelessness.

  On Christmas evening she bled copiously and miscarried the child. She burned with fever. Her mother bathed her sweat-soaked brow with damp towels. In her fevered delirium Shoshana shrieked Voltaire’s name. Their elderly family physician, Dr. Villancourt, examined her and reported that there was nothing he could do, for she had essentially lost her will to live. Once her fever subsided, she sank again into indescribable depths of melancholy. Filled with loathing for everyone and everything, she said not a word for five weeks.

  One early January morning while her mother was away visiting a milliner and trying on a new hat, Shoshana felt a freezing chill invade her body. She was stiff, and it took her a long time to get out of bed. All of her strength seemed to have ebbed away.

  Slowly and with great care she twisted her sheet into a thick noose. She put on a red dress, stepped up onto a stool, twisted the sheet around a hook in a beam, and put her head through the noose. She straightened up for a moment as if she intended to say something, but then she drew the noose tight and kicked away the stool. A violent shudder went through her wasted body.

  AS DARKNESS FELL in January 1772, three days after Shoshana’s death, the city of Bologna set off fireworks at the university. Perhaps they were not as spectacular as the legendary fireworks of forty years earlier in celebration of the appointment of Laura Bassi as the first female professor at Europe’s most ancient seat of learning. But it was nevertheless a relatively impressive pyrotechnic display.

  Hundreds of rockets shot into the skies; their explosions sketched out brilliant white lilies against the darkness of the firmament, all in celebration of the formal acceptance of Shoshana’s thesis and her posthumous election as a member of the Academy of Sciences of Bologna.

  Voltaire stood in the immense crowd of people assembled to watch the spectacle and cheer. His eyes filled with tears as he watched the shower of burning stars.

  THE SCIENCE OF PHYSICS was all the rage during the nineteenth century. Royalty followed progress in the physical sciences, the growing bourgeoisie interested itself in the new advances, and newspapers profiled the leading physicists—Ampère, Faraday, Ohm, Volta—as the great heroes of the age. Anyone who made a significant discovery automatically had his name inscribed in the public mind when a unit of measure was named after him. In contrast, the name of Shoshana Spinoza disappeared from memory.

  POSSIBLY THE GREATEST BREAKTHROUGH in physics occurred in 1905 when a young man named Albert Einstein, an employee of the patent office in Bern, published four articles in the German physics journal Annalen der Physik. He was immediately hailed by scientists across the world. Now there would be no turning back. The world would never be the same.

  Einstein’s fourth article is of special interest for the story of Shoshana. It deals with the relation between mass and energy and contains the famous formula E=mc2 (in which E stands for energy, m for mass, and c for the speed of light). His formula confirmed that Shoshana’s calculations were correct and her theory was valid.

  A FEW HOURS before Nicolas drew his first breath, Shoshana’s father gave her a red dress. It was her birthday present, for fate in its mysterious fashion had decided to bring her little brother into the world on the very day that she turned five.

  She had dreamed of such a dress for months, ever since her mother had taken her to the Théâtre-Français to see Jean Racine’s classic tragedy Phèdre. Madame Spinoza wanted to interest her daughter in the classics of Greek theater. She explained that Racine’s story was based on Greek mythology, and he had borrowed freely from his antique precursor Euripides, whose attitude was completely different and whose style was much more controlled. But Shoshana was very young, and she understood almost nothing of the play about the queen who falls in love with the wrong man and finally chooses to take her own life. Throughout the entire performance the child had eyes for nothing but the red dress the acclaimed actress Thelma was wearing to play the title role. Shoshana dreamed that one day she, too, would have a glorious dress like that one and it would transform her into a queen.

  The five-year-old was enormously excited by the birthday gift from her father and wanted to show it to her mother. Madame Spinoza was in her bedroom behind closed doors that day, and the room was barred to her daughter. Shoshana stood outside and tried to catch a glimpse of her mother; but the door was quickly shut each time Dr. Villancourt, the family’s jovial physician, or any of the strange women with him entered or left the bedchamber.

  The girl heard sobs, shrieks, cries, and groans behind the door. She asked who was crying. “Go away!” replied her father as he paced back and forth in the hall. Only Gilbert, the family servant, had a kind word to spare for Shoshana. He explained that her mama was about to have a new baby and the strangers in the house were busy helping her.

  Suddenly they heard a scream: “Madre mía, madre mía!” The wailing became even louder. Shoshana was terrified when she realized that it was her mother making those sounds.

  A few minutes later she was called into the bedchamber. The strange women were moving about the room, smiling. The proud father laughed and held up the newborn. At the first glimpse of the child’s face, they were struck with astonishment.

  “Your son,” Hector said, turning toward the bed whe
re his wife lay pale and still, “is a true Spinoza. Look at his incredibly large nose. He’s so beautiful; he’s the most perfect boy child imaginable.”

  NICOLAS WAS THE ONLY ONE of the siblings with a talent for music. Even when he was a small boy his beautiful singing voice astonished his family. At the age of five, shortly after the sudden death of their father, he was allowed to enter the boarding school for choirboys at the Église Saint-Sulpice in the Franciscan monastery in Ferney, close to Voltaire’s château.

  His mother was not entirely pleased that her son the Jewish boy de buena famiya was required to spend all his time in church, from the early-morning service of matins to evening vespers, dressed in a choir robe and wearing a four-cornered black cap.

  Voltaire reassured her. “The boy has a gift for music, and we should do everything possible to encourage it. In addition, it will do him no harm to be exposed to the Christian faith. It may even prove useful eventually and provide him access to the better sort of society. Madame, you know how things are in this country. One must not hide one’s lamp beneath a bushel. If we were living in India I would tell Nicolas to hold a cow by the tail. Here in France he picks up a crucifix. We two have no greater wish than to see him join the ranks of noble thinkers, those who distinguish themselves with their intelligence, insight, and tolerance. The ultimate goal of all culture is personal development.”

  To Nicolas, Voltaire spoke directly and with no particular allowance for the boy’s tender age. “Take me as your model, not your mother. This is for your own good. You’ll have to give up your Jewish identity. This will improve your prospects in life, and you’ll be better accepted by others. You will see: One day you’ll be a highly respected philosopher.”