AS A GENERAL RULE the ecclesiastical school of the Saint-Sulpice cloister never accepted Jewish pupils. It was only with the greatest reluctance that Abbot Hugo Montell made an exception and arranged for a place for Nicolas after he received a letter from Cardinal of Geneva Monseigneur Carlos Fellici communicating His Eminence’s strong desire that the cloister school instruct Voltaire’s ward in the true Christian faith. No one dared to say so openly, but neither the school’s teachers nor the parents were pleased to have a Jewish boy in that stringent Catholic boarding school.
NICOLAS REMEMBERED all his life the terror of his arrival at the cloister. He felt a clutch of fear as he descended from the carriage with Voltaire’s servant and caught sight of the immense main building. Ominous monks stood sternly watching him as he waited next to the window in the refectory. Voltaire’s description of their goodness and sympathy had led him to expect a completely different reception.
The immensely stout and bald Abbot Montell received them and inspected him with curiosity and distinct distaste. Nicolas sat as if nailed to the chair. He tried to appear both pleased and resolute, all the while yearning for his sister, Shosana, always the one sure refuge in his existence. He could scarcely hold back his tears. He sensed very clearly how unwelcome he was at the church school.
AT THE CLOSE of his second day of classes, Nicolas sat daydreaming and failed to appear sufficiently attentive to the teacher, who had been watching him closely.
“I’m very pleased with all of you,” the teacher said. “That is, all except one of you. Only one boy failed to pay attention to the fascinating account of the life of Jesus I read to you. One boy sat there and fidgeted the whole time, chewing his nails. A single young man has brought shame upon the entire class.” He made a dramatic pause. Nicolas wondered who the culprit could have been. “You, Nicolas Spinoza, our new Jewish pupil, you behaved in a despicable manner. I’ve never seen anyone so distracted, anyone who showed such a lack of respect as you have for the suffering of Jesus. Your behavior is, in a word, unforgiveable, and I understand why none of the other boys wants to have anything to do with you.”
The teacher pursed his lips. All of the other boys looked at Nicolas in disgust.
THE NEXT DAY he was humiliated in the school yard by an older boy who pretended to shake hands with him but clenched his hand so hard that he forced Nicolas to his knees. He received a violent kick in the stomach as a further reminder of the public shaming inflicted upon him. Nicolas rose painfully and stood there unsteadily with tears running down his cheeks. The older boy, the undisputed leader of the choirboys, spat in his face, prompting general glee among all the boys.
For years the other choirboys harassed Nicolas. He was always isolated, he had no friends at the cloister, and no one intervened to stop the constant disparaging comments of the monks and the other boys. Sometimes Nicolas hated his Jewishness because it made others despise him.
AT THE AGE OF THIRTEEN, when Nicolas entered puberty and hair began to appear on his cheeks, he was summarily expelled, in accordance with the rules of the boarding school of the Église Saint-Sulpice.
He felt humiliated and had no idea where to turn. Shoshana had moved out of Voltaire’s residence—he knew that from her letters—and he had no desire to live alone in the philosopher’s house. Sobbing, he picked up his bundle of possessions and began to trudge through the November chill toward Paris.
He wandered through a desolate landscape. Poverty-stricken villages and farms were scattered about the forests. Only along the rivers did the land appear fertile. Settlements were small and widely dispersed. He saw a number of cows apparently untended along the riverbanks. There was drizzling rain almost every day. He suffered from the cold and found it hard to distinguish the roads. He could see he was on his way to getting lost. Sometimes he longed for the cloister’s ascetic comforts, for the strict but assured daily routine, for the music of the organ in the church. Those feelings of nostalgia never lasted long.
Day followed day, and he soon established a rhythm for his journey. During the morning hours it was easy to cover distances, for he was fresh and could lose himself in his fantasies. Later, as the day progressed, his thoughts became disconnected, and he could no longer think straight. Fatigue set in and his feet began to ache. Late in the evenings he would try to find some sheltering grove where he could sleep.
He got to Paris toward the end of December. He saw the silhouettes of the towers of Notre Dame far away in the distance. He put down his bundle and stood motionless for a time, leaning against a tree. He felt terribly homesick.
NICOLAS WOULD NEVER FORGET the sight that greeted him when he took off his shoes upon arriving at his mother’s apartment. The soles of his feet were black. The stain was deeply embedded in his skin and impossible to wash away. The bottoms of his feet had dried and cracked, and the stink of them was so terrible that even the lice stayed away. He looked in the mirror. During the four weeks it had taken him to walk to Paris he had lost twenty-five pounds. He was shocked by the hardened face staring back at him from the mirror. He realized that the hard trek had made a new person of him.
He hadn’t seen his mother for many years. She had aged prematurely and was sunk in gray melancholy. He noticed the signs, so unusual for an Arditti, of despair and listlessness. She had become an exhausted old woman, unable to take her son in. Shoshana was living there and was already more than their mother could handle. Madame Spinoza made no effort to pretend she was pleased to see her son.
While Nicolas was taking a warm bath, she wrote to Philippe Charrier, formerly a friend of her husband and now the rector of the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, one of the country’s best preparatory schools. She explained that Shoshana had lost her mind and required constant attention. She was overwhelmed by the task. She could not possibly house Nicolas as well. She entreated Charrier to take charge of Nicolas, to give him hope and inspire him with sensible counsel.
She handed the letter to Nicolas and told him he would have to leave. She kissed his cheek and reminded him that he was de buena famiya.
Nicolas was downcast and discouraged from his long journey. He stood in the hall and wished that fate had been kinder to him. He wanted to stay close to his mother and sister, but once again he was forced to endure separation from his family. He wasn’t even permitted to speak to Shoshana. He took a deep breath and went out to the waiting coach, not knowing that he had just seen his mother for the last time.
PHILIPPE CHARRIER greeted Nicolas as if he were an old friend. Nothing in his warm voice betrayed the fact that they had never met. He accompanied the boy through several rooms. In the innermost sanctum they settled at a table covered with a snow-white linen tablecloth, and Charrier offered him some heavenly fragrant spice bread. An old-fashioned writing desk with a worn leather blotter stood in one corner. An oil lamp hung from the ceiling.
Charrier’s wife, Madame Léonie, came into the room and smiled warmly at Nicolas. The rector presented the boy to her with flattering words that somewhat embarrassed his guest. “Here you have Nicolas Spinoza, an intrepid little adventurer born to an ancient line of philosophers. He’ll stay with us and attend school. And I’ll keep a vigilant eye upon him.”
Madame Léonie greeted Nicolas warmly and addressed him as “Monsieur.” This was the first time in his life anyone had done so. At her request, the boy gave an account of himself and his time as a choirboy, somewhat reluctantly, then described the long journey to Paris and his arrival at his mother’s house.
After a time a noticeably well-dressed boy appeared. He bowed politely, but his inscrutable smile made Nicolas feel ill at ease. The boy was watching him like a hawk.
“This is Maximilien Robespierre, a pupil from Arras, our talented young friend,” Charrier explained. “His benefactor is none other than the bishop of Arras. Maximilien is a quick study. Nicolas, you’ll both be living with us. You two will be like brothers.”
The boy from Arras seated himself and took a slice of bread. Madame
Léonie asked him what had happened in school. The boy responded with such refined words that he made Nicolas feel like a savage.
A servant opened a bottle of red wine for the Charrier couple, and the rector unexpectedly began to tell them about his childhood in Dijon. In school he had taken an interest in topics that attracted no one else. One particular enigma had long occupied his thoughts as a child: Why was it darker at night than by day, given the inconceivable number of stars, many of them far larger than the sun, that in their great mass provided the eternal light that illuminated the heavens?
It was no wonder he’d never had any friends, he commented with a hearty laugh. Not even during his teenage years did he come across anyone of his own age with whom he could discuss such conundrums. That hadn’t particularly bothered him, but it had given him a sense that he was different from others of his age.
Nicolas recognized himself in the rector’s remarks, but he didn’t dare say so.
Charrier told them how he had come to Paris as a young student carrying well-thumbed copies of Plato and Molière in his pack. His hunger for learning had motivated him to seek scientific knowledge and investigate the mysteries of the cosmos. He had listened to many intelligent men in Paris before encountering Hector Spinoza, who had taught him so much. He was deeply grateful for their friendship. Hector gave life to his fantasies and opened his eyes to all kinds of new things. For example, Hector had told him how Isaac Newton was struck on the head by an apple falling from the tree of science and as a result became the first to work out calculations that explained how the Creator constructed the universe. The English physicist was the founder of modern science, the rector declared. Charrier said that thoughts were always bubbling in Hector’s vast soul, concerning everything from the Creator to the flight of the bee; he would hold forth just as happily on the principles of statecraft as on the mystery of reincarnation. Hector, he told them as he sipped his wine, had encyclopedic knowledge and loved to discuss matters beyond the comprehension of humankind.
As Charrier spoke, Nicolas seemed to travel back in time. He saw how much the friendship of his father had meant to the rector. He swelled with pride. Suddenly he remembered that when he was a little boy, every night his father would tuck him in and give him a kiss. Afterward, as his father walked away, Nicolas would quickly pull the blanket over his head and blink hard, in an effort to go to sleep. The strange thing was that he could see that scene clearly before him, but he could no longer remember his father’s face.
A FEW WEEKS AFTER his arrival in the Charrier family he received a letter from Voltaire. The philosopher invited Nicolas to come stay at his château in Ferney. He promised to send a leather pouch with more than enough coin to cover the cost of the journey. Voltaire vividly described life in the country as an exciting adventure for a young man. He appealed to the boy, mentioning his loneliness and his difficulties with the great pocket lexicon. He also reported, not without a touch of self-irony, that he was finding it very difficult to urinate; that simple bodily function was causing him considerable discomfort and obliged him to make frequent recourse to his chamber pot, each time producing only a few pitiful drops.
Several more letters followed, and Nicolas’s memory of the man who had brusquely sent him off to the cloister boarding school faded as he read the lively lines. The boy began to repress memories of the miseries and burnish those of the good times at the philosopher’s residence, for he longed to have an affectionate father figure.
ONE SUNDAY IN MARCH Nicolas awakened to find himself with a throbbing erection. That morning twenty years before his execution would live in Nicolas’s memory with a vividness that would surpass most of his later memories.
The boy had no idea what to do in order to return his member to its usual proportions. He was afraid that it would never again be normal, and he wondered what the women in the house, Madame Léonie and Eloise, would say. Eloise, the wet nurse for of the youngest child, was a sharp-tempered Gascon woman who wasn’t afraid to talk back to the rector and bared her milk-filled breasts without shame. As Nicolas thought of Eloise, he felt a warm rush of feeling and remembered his dreams of going to bed with that young peasant girl, drinking milk from her breasts, and seizing her by her broad hips. He took his penis in hand, held it tightly, and completely surrendered to the intoxicating arousal that gave him pleasure such as he had never known before. He was in the midst of these fantasies about Eloise when Maximilien interrupted, pounding on the door and calling out that he had a visitor.
Gilbert appeared in the doorway with grave news for Nicolas. There had always been something boyish in the appearance of the old servant, but now his bleak gaze and the way he pressed together his fleshy lips in that expressionless face conveyed an entirely different message. They sat down in the private sanctum and without beating around the bush, Gilbert told him of Shoshana’s death and Madame Spinoza’s subsequent difficulty in obtaining a burial permit, because suicides could not be interred in holy ground. It had taken Gilbert a month to get Shoshana’s body placed in a mass grave in the catacombs beneath Paris. Madame Spinoza hadn’t had the strength to inform Nicolas personally of the death of his sister. And now Madame Spinoza was gone as well, without leaving so much as a letter of farewell. She had gone to sleep peacefully two evenings earlier, not aware that death was lurking in her bowels, and she did not wake up in the morning. Dr. Villancourt believed that a ruptured appendix had taken her life.
Nicolas was surprised at his own calm and by how little the deaths of his sister and mother affected him. He told Gilbert that all of this was a complete surprise—but so it was with death; it always arrived when one least expected it. He recalled that he was five years old when his father died. He remembered that day only very vaguely, no more clearly than the day he was placed in the cloister school. Everything had happened in a flash and there he was, alone and isolated from his family. Since then he had almost never seen any of them again—not his mother, not Shoshana, and not Avraham. They were all gone now, but even before, they’d seemed more like phantoms than persons of flesh and blood. Voltaire was the only person who seemed real to him, Nicholas said, because he’d always been there, as real as the air that one breathes. Nicolas told Gilbert of the philosopher’s letter and said he had promised to spend a couple of weeks that summer at the philosopher’s residence in Ferney.
Gilbert interrupted the young man and offered words of warning. “Voltaire is a philosopher rightly revered for his great intelligence,” he said. “One should certainly praise him for his generosity as well, for he volunteered to become your guardian after your father’s death. However …” The old servant lowered his voice. “He did this not from friendship or love but out of self-interest. He has always had an ulterior motive. He’s after something that belongs to you.”
I WISH I had a better insight into all the matters involving Voltaire, for he was a complicated and fascinating figure.
On the one hand he did many good things. He preached tolerance to a world in which heretics and Jews were still being burned at the stake. He shook up the society in which he lived with his energetic opposition to miscarriages of justice. He vaunted the principles of freedom, and he laid out the intellectual premises for the French Revolution. He created masterpieces of literature and philosophical thought. He overcame a childhood of poverty and ended his life as a wealthy man.
On the other hand, he was shrewd and conniving. He often employed lies to force truth into the open. He was a false-faced toady, he was ingratiating, and he flattered royalty to gain access to the corridors of power. To some he presented a friendly face, only to stab them in the back when it suited him. He was a traitor to his class origins, a man who lived in luxury and extravagance.
When I try to understand Voltaire, I have nothing to go on other than what my great-uncle told us. But sometimes it feels as if Voltaire, like a Spinoza, might have inherited both of the two fundamentally opposed traits and destinies that turned up in every generation of our family
.
I must use the months—perhaps only days—that I have left for my family history. I don’t have time to undertake a study of Voltaire’s life.
ALL OF A SUDDEN I’ve recalled something that my great-uncle described to Sasha and me. I’m not surprised to find myself thinking of it now.
In Alte Bücher, one of Vienna’s choicest antique bookshops, during the 1930s my great-uncle was searching for books about the Catholic Inquisition in Spain, and he came across the memoirs of Charles-Joseph Lamorals, seventh Prince de Ligne. The prince stemmed from a line of Belgian aristocrats but became a field marshal in the Austrian army and lived in Vienna until 1814. De Ligne had been a great admirer of Voltaire and once had occasion to call upon him at the château in Ferney.
The prince was completely captivated by what he termed “sa belle et brillante imagination”—the philosopher’s generous spirit and dazzling sense of imagination. Voltaire usually went about with a little black skullcap covering the crown of his head; he mentioned that during his time in Dieppe and Colmar he had lived in the Jewish quarter. He gave his visitor a dramatic reading from a text—written in direct response to the Lisbon Inquisition’s sentencing of thirty-three Jews to the bonfires—that he had titled “Sermon of Rabbi Akib, Pronounced in Smyrna.” In the guise of that fictitious rabbi the philosopher delivered devastating criticisms of Christians who persecuted Jews on the pretext that they had murdered Jesus:
If only you had sufficient wits to reply, I would ask you why you seek to exterminate us, we who are the fathers of your fathers. What would you reply if I were to tell you that your God belongs to our religion? He was born a Jew, he was circumcised as a Jew, he was baptized, admit it, by John, who was also a Jew … He complied with the mandates of Jewish law. He lived as a Jew and died as a Jew, while you—you burn us alive because we are Jews.
The Elixir of Immortality Page 37
