Finding Emilie (10 page)

She had to make do with random scraps of remembered conversation after she fetched Maupertuis and they were en route to his home. Once there, she would spend an hour or two being tutored in calculus while her carriage waited outside. Her arrangement with Maupertuis had been going on for a few months now, beginning when she was able to come out in public again after the birth of her third child. Already she could see that her questions and ideas seemed to unnerve the illustrious Maupertuis. If she were not paying handsomely for his time, he would probably have ended his tutelage, saying he was too busy to make time for someone with no prospect of contributing to the field. All that, just to cover the fact that her questions were really quite beyond him.

Despite her frustration, the chance to talk about advanced math at all, even with someone as overblown as Maupertuis, was the best part of her present life. “I’m twenty-seven years old,” she whispered into the glass, making a ring of fog that immediately vanished. “And I am so bored I—” She pressed her teeth into her gloved knuckle and sighed. Motherhood was a disappointment, since aristocratic women spent little time with their children. Her daughter, Gabrielle-Pauline, now seven, had already been removed to the Ursuline Convent to begin her education. Her son Florent-Louis was five, and his father had turned his heir into little more than a toy soldier with as little imagination and humor as possible. Her infant boy, Victor-Esprit, was weak and it was best not to think too much about what his prospects were when so many children, even in families with money for doctors and medicine, did not survive infancy.

She settled back into her seat. “I do love that sweet child,” she whispered. Perhaps most of all three. Society permitted a frail child to need its mother, and that gave her permission to need Victor-Esprit. She certainly didn’t need her husband, nor he her, except for the social practicalities of marriage. Now that a war had broken out over
the succession to the Polish throne, she rarely saw Florent-Claude, since he lived near the border with the regiment he commanded. But even before that, their marriage was always one of convenience and little more. He had few interests and even fewer ideas, excusing himself early from the dinner table when the subject turned to any of the things that so fascinated her. The marquis was not a difficult man, and she was thankful for that, but wouldn’t it be nice to find oneself in bed with a man of real—

“Real appetites” she whispered. “I want someone who—” She thought for a moment. Someone who would end a discussion—even an argument—about the rarest and finest of the day’s new ideas, by tearing off her clothes and ravishing her. The most erotic thing in the world had to be when minds met and bodies followed. She sat back in the coach as forcefully as if the horse had jerked it forward, at the realization of just how desperately she wanted that to happen to her. I need a lover, she thought. But not just any lover. That kind.

She felt the coach jiggle as the driver jumped down to open the door. Pierre-Louis du Maupertuis stepped up and settled down across from her. He was thirty-five, with a bulbous forehead and a rather large nose, but altogether he cut a pleasant enough figure, and he was much admired for his wit by the ladies at court. Emilie eyed him sidelong as the coach rumbled through the streets of Paris. Bodies meeting minds? He was not the answer to her fantasy, she was sure, but he would serve as an adequate test of her hypothesis.

1765

T
HE MALLET
connected with an off-center thunk, and the ball dribbled less than a meter across the grass. “Oh, dear,” Delphine said, looking up with a pretty smile at the cluster of guests playing a game of paille-maille on one of the lawns of the château of Vaux-le-Vicomte.

“You must hit the ball with more force,” Jacques-Mars Courville said. “May I?” He came up behind and slipped his hands alongside hers. “Like this.” The young man followed through with a firm whack and the ball rolled cleanly across a meter of short grass, directly through the metal arch at which he had been aiming.

The guests at Vaux-le-Vicomte clapped, as fifteen-year-old Delphine turned her face up toward Jacques-Mars and gave him an admiring smile. “Perhaps it is my good fortune to be so bad at this that I require the help of someone so charming,” she said in a deliberately lilting voice.

“And perhaps it will be my good fortune that you find you cannot master it.” Seeing Delphine’s confusion, he went on. “So you will permit me to help you forever,” he said, bowing with such dramatic exaggeration that the others broke out in amused applause.

Lili suppressed a groan. No one could be as bad at paille-maille as Delphine pretended to be, and it was infuriating the way she slowed everything down, as if the whole point was to call as much attention to herself as possible. Anne-Mathilde and Joséphine, those
disgusting girls from the abbey, were just as bad. Of the two, it was hard to know which was worse. Anne-Mathilde’s hair was curled in the latest style, and her skin was as perfect as ever, with a hint of a blush from the summer sun. At seventeen, she had gained a little weight, revealing her curves under a loosely corseted summer dress that was the latest style for a relaxing sojourn away from Paris.

Joséphine de Maurepas was still the perfect foil. She also had grown an inch or two, but remained thin and flat-chested, with no feature worth singling out for a kind remark. Josephine’s prestige lay entirely in Anne-Mathilde’s preference for her, which was understandable, given that Joséphine could always be counted upon to gossip about others without the slightest shred of mercy, and even more importantly, she viewed Anne-Mathilde as perfect in every way. Lili watched as the two of them fluttered their little fans over their mouths as they bent in to make some comment or another, most likely about Jacques-Mars’s obvious attraction to Delphine.

Trying not to glower, Lili stepped up to her ball. She sized it up for only a moment before hitting it cleanly through a hoop planted in the lawn at about two meters’ distance. What a waste of time this is, she thought, grimly planting a smile back on her face before looking up.

VAUX-LE-VICOMTE HAD BEEN
recently purchased by the Duc de Praslin, Anne-Mathilde’s father. When Maman had made plans for a month-long respite from the sultry August heat in Paris, Lili had been eager to come, even if it meant putting up with Anne-Mathilde and Joséphine. The usually idyllic Place Royale had no special protection from the stench rising up from the sewage and rotting garbage floating in the Seine. The eye-watering odor rose up and gathered force as it wafted down the filthy streets and alleyways of the city before—at least it seemed to Lili—it sank with special malevolence over the Place Royale. She was tired of hiding in the deepest recesses of Hôtel Bercy to keep her head from throbbing. Now she could remember only the advantages of its solitude.

She looked across the sculpted gardens beyond the lawn toward the imposing yellow sandstone walls of the massive château. The jagged rows of steeply pitched sections of roof were mottled with dark verdigris, crowned by a massive dome over the main foyer. From the open arches of the cupola on top of the dome she had looked out the morning after their arrival at endless stretches of clipped boxwood hedges in beds of crushed red brick that looked more like Turkish carpets than anything found in nature.

The view from the cupola at Vaux-le-Vicomte made it clear that visitors there were to walk in straight lines up and down the parterres and along the walkways of the canals rather than have ideas of their own about what to do or where to go. Even flowers were not allowed to splatter their colors over such a perfect subjugation of nature, except in tight girdles around statues, which were spaced out in perfect rows in each tidy rectangle of lawn. Beyond the green moat around the château, Lili counted eight artificial, geometrically shaped lakes placed in perfect symmetry along a broad pathway that ran like a spine down the middle of the property.

It’s as if the whole place is wearing a corset, Lili thought as she and Delphine stood in the cupola that morning. Lili agreed to stroll through every open room on the ground floor in return for Delphine’s word they would climb what felt like hundreds of steps to the best viewpoint on the estate. Looking down, Delphine had eyes only for the strolling parties of women in shimmering gowns and ruffled parasols, accompanied by men in dark coats and fitted trousers. She could hardly wait to get back down to begin meeting whoever was presently in residence.

At fifteen, Delphine had grown from a pretty girl into a beautiful young woman, with hair as lovely as a cascading bolt of pinkish yellow silk, now caught up stylishly under a tiny hat. Though her skin was inclined to freckle in the summer, a thin coat of lotion tamed it to a soft glow. No one would be likely to glance long away from her large, green eyes to notice any imperfections. “I plan to charm everyone who will pay me any notice,” she had said as they turned to leave
the cupola. “I shall be scintillating.” She paused a moment to search for another word. “Just impertinent enough to be endearing.”

“You’ve been reading too many novels,” Lili retorted.

“Well, why shouldn’t I try to make everyone notice me?” Delphine sniffed. “The best entries into society are by girls whose reputation for charm and beauty has preceded them. I intend to surpass them all, and since you don’t care a whit about any of it, I’ll do it without you.”

Lili scarcely noticed the snappishness in Delphine’s voice. In the distance, beyond the constraints and forced perfection of the grounds, treetops of a vast forest billowed and undulated like a skirt loose and light enough for her to pick up in her hands and run laughing into another world. Equestrian trails headed off here and there, disappearing into the thick trees. That’s where I want to be, Lili thought. By myself. Alone with my thoughts, and maybe a book, under a tree.

“Well?” Delphine challenged.

“Well, what?”

“Are you going to go around being a good guest with me, or just spend the next month flopping around on a couch reading philosophy, or working out pointless math problems, or whatever it is you do?”

Lili sighed. “I can’t help what I am.”

“Well, if you cared a little more about your hair, and not having ink stains on your fingers, you would get a lot more attention.” Delphine turned again to look down at the people in the garden. “It’s cold up here. Aren’t you ready to go down?”

Lili ignored her. “I’m not you,” she said. “I’m not dainty, or pretty—or interested, for that matter.”

Delphine snorted. “You act like you’re some ugly little troll, and you’re not bad-looking in the slightest!” Lili would probably be better described as handsome, a word often used to describe women with no irregularities substantial enough to make them unappealing, but lacking in the delicacy and harmony of features that would warrant
anything more than the occasional description of “rather attractive.” Her eyes were perhaps a bit too large and an imprecise shade of brown, and her hair had settled into an uncertain hue somewhere between brown and black. Furthermore, as Delphine constantly pointed out, Lili didn’t make the effort to maintain her hair neatly, keep her skin powdered, or put the slightest touch of rouge on her cheeks or lips. “It would make such a difference,” Delphine had admonished, her voice trailing off wistfully, as if she were witnessing a tragedy unfolding before her eyes.

LAUGHTER FROM THE
group playing paille-maille brought Lili’s attention back to the present. What good did it do her that the woods were beckoning, since she was not permitted to walk or ride in them alone, and every possible companion seemed to have an incomprehensible preference for hitting wooden balls for hours on end? She sighed, loud enough to be heard. Julie linked her arm in Lili’s and eased the two of them out of earshot onto a gravel pathway that grumbled under their feet with each step.

“Scowling will give you wrinkles,” Julie said, looking at Lili from under her parasol. Its rose-colored silk cast a warm glow over her face. “What’s wrong?”

“I’d so much rather be doing just about anything else,” Lili said, tossing her head just in time to see Anne-Mathilde dissolve into giggles after hitting the ball as poorly as Delphine had done. “What is the matter with those girls? Delphine could hit that stupid ball. Why is she acting like it’s so much fun to be bad at something?”

“Delphine is quite a flirt,” Julie said. “And she seems to enjoy the attention.” Her expression turned serious as she looked at Lili. “You’re almost sixteen, and it’s normal to start paying attention to the men around you. It won’t be long until you and Delphine are the talk of the court, with everyone wondering who you’ll marry. Aren’t you at all curious about that?”

“I’m curious whether anyone exists who thinks paille-maille is as boring as I do.” Lili gave her parasol a punishing twirl in her hands. “Please, can’t we go riding instead?”

“Maman, look!” Delphine called out. She gave the ball a resounding pop and it careened against the metal hoop, but made it through. The crowd applauded, Joséphine and Anne-Mathilde tittered, and Delphine cocked her head in a well-practiced manner before handing her mallet to Jacques-Mars as if he were born to carry it in one hand and her parasol in the other.