Finding Emilie (29 page)

“Her mother says you practically accused her of throwing Joséphine into Jacques-Mars’s arms,” Maman said.

Lili took in a breath to defend herself, but before she could reply, Maman smiled. “Congratulations. It’s about time someone did. That Anne-Mathilde is a menace.”

She smiled at Lili as she took a piece of cheese. “What did you say, really?”

“I don’t remember exactly,” Lili replied, “but I didn’t let her get away with saying she had no idea Jacques-Mars was paying attention to Joséphine.”

“Then she said”—Delphine broke in with a perfect imitation of Anne-Mathilde’s voice—“I’m not responsible for what people do when I’m not there, am I?” She sniffed. “A bit too strong a protest, if you ask me.”

Worried, Lili broke in. “Am I in trouble with the duchess, Maman?”

Julie laughed. “I don’t think so. I think she sees into her daughter’s—” She thought for a moment. “Her shriveled little heart. But the family is set on a marriage with Ambroise Clément de Feuillet, and I think she hopes you can be intimidated into not making Anne-Mathilde look bad in front of him.” A sly smirk flitted across Julie’s face. “I assume that was your plan?”

Lili looked down at her plate. “Oui, Maman. I must admit it was.” Julie’s expression was amused, but her voice was firm. “Anne-Mathilde’s done herself some damage tonight. The duchess is alarmed by Ambroise’s indifference to her daughter, and neither of you—I repeat neither of you—should do anything about it. The Praslin family is very powerful, and you don’t know how appearing to have plotted against Anne-Mathilde will harm you in the future, but you can be sure it will.”

Julie got up from the table. “And now, ma chérie,” she said to Delphine, “I think you should go out and dance. Not with him, of course. That would be too blatant. But he’ll be watching how prettily you move around the floor. Let’s go strengthen you first with a little warm chocolat.” She brushed a crumb from Delphine’s bodice. “And then find you a dancing partner.”

DELPHINE WAS A
vision in pink and ivory as she danced a chaconne with the man who had helped her when she fainted. She smiled at him as if he were the most handsome man in the room, although he
was barely taller than she was, and much older. He was an excellent dancer, however, and Delphine moved across the floor so delicately that it seemed as if she were lifted by a breeze and had no feet at all.

Lili’s eyes swept the room and found Ambroise dancing with Anne-Mathilde. She’s quite graceful, Lili thought, wishing it weren’t true. When the music ended some of the dancers began to move off, but Delphine stayed in place with her partner for the next dance. Ambroise guided Anne-Mathilde back toward her mother, with more than one furtive glance in Delphine’s direction. At the first notes of a minuet, Delphine took her partner’s hand again.

Suddenly, before they could begin the first steps, the music stopped. A murmur arose in the crowd as everyone turned to look in the direction of the king and queen. They had risen to their feet, and Marie Leszczynska was being led away, leaning heavily on the arm of Madame Victoire. One of the king’s ministers held up his hand for silence. “We’ve just received news from Fontainebleau. The dauphin is dead. Long live Dauphin Louis-Auguste.” Without saying more, he turned and walked with the king to a side door.

When the king disappeared from view, a hush settled down over the Salon de Mars. Lili heard a few sobs, as small groups of men and women headed slowly toward the doors, murmuring among themselves. Lili turned to Julie. “You’re crying, Maman!”

“Of course!” she said. “He would have been our king. And dear Marie Leszczynska has lost yet another child.”

“Maman?” Delphine’s ashen-faced partner had deposited her with Julie before rushing toward a group of friends waiting for him.

“Come,” Julie said. “All France will be in mourning by tomorrow. We’ll be going back to Paris as soon as we can pack. The queen will expect us to pay her the courtesy of not making her ask for privacy.”

“Home?” Delphine gasped in disbelief. “Now?” Holding her hand to her mouth, she whirled around to look for Ambroise. Lili knew she would not find him. She had already seen him disappearing from the king’s apartments with Anne-Mathilde on his arm.

F
LORENT-LOUIS DU
Châtelet stood on his toes and held the piece of hand-lettered paper as high as his eleven-year-old arms could reach. “Anton! Hand me the hammer!” A smaller boy of about the same age, dressed in the simple clothing of a villager, put the tool in the outstretched fingers of the heir to the Château de Cirey. Florent-Louis gave several light taps to a nail, just enough to affix the paper to the door.

He stood back to admire his handiwork. “Want me to read it to you? It says ‘Tonight at the Theater at Cirey! The premiere of Mérope by M. Voltaire. Cast—Mérope, Madame la Marquise; Polyphontes, Monsieur Voltaire; Ismène, Mademoiselle G-P du Châtelet; Euricles, Monsieur le Marquis, et al.’”

He gestured to the copies in the boy’s hand. “Come on,” he said. “Help me put these up on the front gate and at the church. Race you!” Florent-Louis took off, pumping his legs in his stockings and breeches, the tail of his dark hair flopping against the back of his jacket.

Emilie watched from the window of the upstairs gallery, savoring the commotion. A play was always a good way to relieve the tedium of being the hostess to what was at the moment a houseful of dull company, and the headache-inducing clanging and pounding of the workmen renovating the château. In the four years she and Voltaire had lived at Cirey, their remote haven was rarely without at least one guest from among Europe’s great men of science, but it had been months since Cirey had sparkled with that light. Now it seemed everyone
was off doing something exciting, and she was reduced to receiving letters about their adventures. She couldn’t go to Lapland, as Maupertuis had done, to take measurements to show that the earth was flattened at the poles. She couldn’t even manage to find a way to go abroad, despite corresponding regularly with scientists from all over Europe. It would be so much better if people didn’t always have to come to Cirey to talk face-to-face, but …

No point in fretting over it. She was a woman. She could be a helpmate to great men, but not the other way around. Thank God she had Voltaire in her life. She could talk to him about what were becoming obsessions for her—understanding the deepest principles of physics, and then going further. The God who governed the world through natural law must have had the same orderly mind when it came to shaping the human heart—a natural law for mankind that reflected his will for creation better than biblical legends could.

Of course it annoyed her that after their endless discussions, Voltaire sometimes published her ideas as if they were his own, but at age thirty-two, she’d started too late and accomplished too little to establish an independent reputation as a natural philosopher herself. She inspired the greatest writer of the age to exercise his mind, not just with history and clever satire but with science, and it was good to see her ideas in print, even if works like their treatise on Newton were in his name alone. He said flattering things about her in his dedications, and that would have to be enough.

Through the open window on the other side of the room, she heard the sound of a carriage coming up the sloping path to the château. Gabrielle-Pauline, most likely. She watched as a carriage rounded the corner and stopped in front. Emilie smiled as her twelve-year-old daughter stepped down. Holding a manuscript in her hand, she stopped to examine the playbill her brother had tacked on the door before Berthe, the downstairs maid, ushered her inside. Thank heaven for a child who could be fetched from the convent and memorize her lines in the carriage before she arrived home. She would go
down to greet her, and then it was time for the house to settle in for a nap before the excitement began.

THE MARQUIS DU
Châtelet walked with his wife from the dining room with their son and daughter. Florent-Louis pointed through a large window to a handful of villagers milling outside. “I told that boy who helped me with the announcement that there might be a costume he could put on and stand on the stage. May I go get him, Father?”

Florent-Claude du Châtelet nodded his approval, and Florent-Louis took off through the gallery door. The marquis summoned Lucien, the downstairs manservant, with a flick of his brow. “Tell the people outside that we’re sorry, but it’s just too damned hot up there to let more than a few of them in.”

Florent-Louis and Anton rushed up the two flights of stairs to the attic. They went through a rough-hewn entryway, past a lattice of beams supporting the roof overhead, into another room with a wood planked floor and an open-beamed ceiling. Voltaire and the rest of the cast had already begun fluttering about amid boxes of wigs on the floor and costumes flung over benches.

Emilie came into the room and held out her arms for a maid to take off her dress. Standing with her hands on her hips and wearing only her chemise and several petticoats, she looked around in amusement at the flurry of activity. Anton stared at the breasts of the châtelaine of the estate, clearly visible under the thin silk, but Emilie did not notice. “Here,” she said, taking him by the hand and leading him to the other side of the stifling attic room. “Let’s see if Berthe has something to fit you.” She left him with the servant, going off with Gabrielle-Pauline so they could pin each other into sheets resembling Greek gowns.

Even though her part tonight did not require singing, by the time the audience of household guests, servants, and awestruck villagers filed in, Emilie had begun warming up her throat with solfège exercises from lessons she’d once taken with a tutor from the Comédie
Italienne. Her soprano voice was so rich and full it cast a spell over the cramped attic, and everyone stopped to listen. Seeing the admiration in people’s eyes, and out of the sheer joy of the moment, Emilie broke into an aria from her favorite opera, Issé. Voltaire, his scrawny legs covered in absurd pink stockings under his toga, and sporting a crown of leaves over his immaculately curled wig, led everyone in a raucous round of applause.

When the audience was seated, Emilie and her daughter stepped onto a tiny stage whose wings and backdrop had been painted to look like a room in a Greek palace. With a grand, tragic gesture, Emilie draped herself on a couch that had been brought up from the parlor, its flowered brocade hastily covered over with a sheet.

“Great queen,” Gabrielle-Pauline said. “Set aside your sad thoughts. The gods have given us victory, and now the people cry out for your coronation as their ruler. Widow of the great Cresphonte and daughter of the king, after fifteen years of the miseries of war, you alone can be the one to lead us into happier times.”

Emilie sat up. “What?” she said, holding one hand dramatically to the side of her head and looking out at the audience in dismay. “Is there no news of my son, the rightful heir? Has he been missing now so long that all pronounce him dead?”

She felt the first trickles of sweat running between her breasts in a room that now seemed airless in the heat. But what did it matter, when in the middle of nowhere, a play by her lover was being performed for the first time under her own roof? She looked up at the open beams of the attic. Under her own roof indeed.

1765

T
HE MUDDY
tracks on the road from Versailles to Paris had frozen as solid as rock, causing the carriage in which Lili and Delphine returned with Maman to Paris to lurch so badly that Lili had trouble focusing on the words in front of her.

“From the sky, Meadowlark picked out the Great Wall of China and guided Comète down to a palace nearby,” she began.

Though Lili’s story about two men dueling for the hand of a princess momentarily lifted the gloom of their return to Paris, by the end Delphine was wiping her eyes again.

“The princess stamped her foot,” Lili read. “‘Rules are rules!’ she said.

“‘Rules are rules,’ Tom said. ‘I suppose so,’ Meadowlark replied. ‘Even as far away as China.’”