Finding Emilie (41 page)

“You must be from Madame the Marquise’s side,” Anton’s wife said. “You look like her, especially from the side.”

Lili’s heart leapt. “My mother …” She struggled to remember the story she had told. “My mother was the Marquise du Châtelet’s niece. Is the baby—”

“Sickly from birth,” the grandmother said. “For reasons known to God.”

The little girl knelt by the cradle and crossed herself solemnly, looking up to make sure that her grandmother had noticed.

“I suppose you must be hungry after that long ride,” Anton’s wife said. “Célie, bring the cheese from the larder.”

The little girl scrambled to her feet. “Where are you from?” she asked when she returned to lay a small round of cheese on the table.

“I’m from Paris.” Lili said.

“Is that near Bar-sur-l’Aube?” Célie asked. “I went there once.” She glanced over at her mother, who was scooping butter into a bowl. “I saw a warf, didn’t I, Maman?”

“You saw a dwarf, ma chérie,” the woman said, and Lili felt a pang of sadness that there was no Maman to call her that anymore.

“Are you rich?” the little girl said. Her grandmother leaned forward and hissed at her to be quiet. The baby gave a tiny cry at the jostling. “Now look what you’ve done!” the old woman said.

Célie’s face crumpled. “I just wanted to know.”

Feeling like an eavesdropper on a family spat, Lili changed the subject. “Didn’t the marquis have a daughter?”

“Didn’t see her much,” the grandmother said. “She was away at a convent in Joinville most of the time and then was married straight from there. To someone Italian maybe—do you remember, Lise?”

Her daughter shrugged. “A foreigner from somewhere.”

“No, not her,” Lili said. “The other one. The one she had just before—”

“Oh, that one. Don’t rightly know,” the old woman said. “I guess I just assumed she’d died, since we never saw her at Cirey.”

“Did you know her name?”

“Can’t say I did.”

I’m less real to them than a cracked egg, Lili thought. And probably little more to the man I’ve come so far to meet.

The sound of horses’ hooves and squeaky carriage wheels in the road outside gave her no time to nurse her bruised feelings. She heard the driver admonish the children to be careful around the horse. “I’d best be going right away,” Lili said, surprised at the gloom in her voice.

“You’ve had nothing to eat!” the woman protested. “We can’t have you going off saying we didn’t feed you!”

“I’m quite fine, thank you,” Lili said, doubting that even water could have made it past a throat suddenly paralyzed with apprehension.

L
IGHT STREAMED
in through the windows and reflected off the glowing wood and crimson wall paneling in the gallery of the Marquis du Châtelet’s ancestral home at Cirey. The doors were open, and a slight breeze wafted up from the lawn and stream below. Songbirds whistled in gilded cages, while next to a lacquered desk strewn with papers and scientific tools Voltaire sat holding court. His throne was a small upholstered armchair, because with his frighteningly thin frame, Voltaire had ordered only furniture that did not make him look even smaller. Overweight guests complained about having not a single comfortable place to sit, but no note was taken of their whispered grumblings.

The owner of Cirey was one of those who could not sit comfortably in Voltaire’s gallery. Though not corpulent, the marquis was a tall man with a barrel chest, who relished the wine from his cellar and the food from his estate, especially when he had hunted it himself.

Even when Florent-Claude was at home, Voltaire did not relinquish the role of grand master of the morning gathering. Other than dinners, often followed by readings or a play in the attic theater, the main entertainment for guests at Cirey was an hour and a half of socializing over coffee before Voltaire and Emilie disappeared for a long day of work. From Voltaire’s command of the room, a stranger walking through would almost certainly conclude that the scion of this quiet estate in Haute-Marne was the birdlike, middle-aged man wearing an old-fashioned wig with rows of tight curls, rather than the
gallant silver-haired gentleman fond enough of his military uniform to sport it even at home.

The marquis was willing to look the other way at some of Voltaire’s high-handedness. After all, the gallery—in fact an entire wing of the château—had been built with the writer’s money. Someday Voltaire would move on, and the beautiful house, hopefully with the second wing completed, would be the marquis’s alone. A château from a nearly uninhabitable ruin, and all for no more than having given a famous man shelter and allowing him to sleep with his wife? Let people gossip. Far better to laugh it off and remain Emilie’s and Voltaire’s champion, since they both needed one, God knew, and therefore needed him.

Though Florent-Claude was more discreet than his wife, he had no grounds for sanctimony. He had already decided to leave earlier than necessary to go back to his regiment via a town house in Nancy where his beautiful new mistress would keep him entertained for a week or two. He would grow weary of her too, as he had long since tired of Emilie, and he would rush off again to the world of men and war, two things he understood without having to work at it.

And now it seemed that Emilie had exhausted Voltaire, just as she had Florent-Claude, not just with her mind but with her endless relish for imaginative and almost interminable lovemaking. Of course she had never gotten that from Florent-Claude. Married sex was perfunctory. Lovers were for kissing, for undressing slowly, for sweet whispers of adoration. He had never felt inclined to give Emilie any of that, nor begrudged her getting it from someone more willing. Well, perhaps he begrudged it a little. After all, he was a man, and no man relished the thought of his wife’s enthusiasm for such things.

Florent-Claude had to admit there was a degree of satisfaction in seeing Voltaire nagged and criticized as if he were the spouse. Just the other night, Emilie had told Voltaire his shirt was trimmed with too much lace. He had responded in English, the language they used when they were aching for a fight. Voltaire had stormed off and had only been persuaded to return by Madame de Graffigny, an overly so
ciable houseguest who had convinced him that her life was over if he would not read scenes from his newest play that evening after supper.

And then there was the satisfaction of the purloined lines of doggerel someone had copied and sent to the marquis, in which Voltaire begged off as Emilie’s lover because his member was too limp for good use, a state he believed was likely to be permanent. Emilie seemed to have taken the matter in stride, and though she insisted the poem was a cruel joke by one of Voltaire’s detractors, she and Voltaire did seem more like old friends than bed partners now. Perhaps her attention had already strayed elsewhere—and as long as she didn’t embarrass the marquis and his family, who cared?—but it was more likely she was pleased not to be distracted from the science that now consumed her every waking moment.

“Listen to this.” Emilie brandished a scientific journal as the servant refreshed the guests’ coffee. “Do you want to know the size of the people who live on Jupiter? It’s all terribly mathematical, so it must be true. Since the eyes are in proportion to the body, and we know the size of the pupil of the eye and the distance from Jupiter to the sun in comparison to the distance from the earth, it works out to …” Emilie thought for a moment before giving a number precise to several decimals.

“Let me see that.” Françoise de Graffigny reached for the paper from which Emilie had read. She looked up, confused. “This is in Latin,” she said, “and I don’t see any numbers at all.”

“I translated as I read,” Emilie replied. “And the equations were simple enough to work out in my head.” She looked puzzled. “I meant it to be funny. Men on Jupiter? Did you think I was serious?”

Their houseguest suppressed a sniff of indignation as she caught the marquis’s eye. When Emilie wasn’t boring them with science, she was ridiculing them for not being as agile-minded as she was. Isn’t that what these little performances were about? If no one else but Voltaire understood, why did she inflict her physics, or whatever it was, on everyone else?

The marquis knew the vapid and tedious Madame de Graffigny’s
mood well. He really should talk to his wife about being better company, her eyes said. Cirey would be such a pleasant place if only the marquise’s intelligence didn’t make things so difficult. Well, let her think that. Did Madame de Graffigny give her husband—or her fop of a lover for that matter—anything to be proud of? Florent-Claude had a wife he could boast about, even if he didn’t understand or care about the things that excited her.

Voltaire rose from his chair. The socializing was over. The coffee was cold. It would be a good day to go hunting, the marquis thought. It was usually a good day to go hunting.

1767

T
HE CARRIAGE
left the front of the cottage, turned onto another village street, went a few meters, and stopped. A grove of trees had hidden the château from Lili’s view before, and she realized she had waited at least an hour to ride a distance she could have walked in a few minutes. Despite her nervousness, she smiled at Anton’s insistence that she arrive in proper style.

The driver opened the gate, and the carriage made a short climb on a path that swept around the side of the château. The house was smaller than she expected and seemed lopsided. The roof was higher in some parts than others, with a flat terrace on top of one section where an attic and mansard roof would normally be. The main section, with a stone-carved arch over the door at its center, was flanked on the right with a taller structure that had no counterpart on the left. The monochromatic yellow of the stone gave the building some appearance of harmony, a look of being both finished and incomplete at the same time.

Lili heard a voice in the garden behind her. An old man in a military uniform was leaning heavily on a cane, yelling into the empty air. She hesitated before taking a few steps in his direction. “Sir?” she called out.

He turned around as quickly as his aged body would allow. “Where is my regiment?” he shouted. “They were camped here last night.”

“I—I don’t know,” Lili said. “I’ve just arrived.” She looked around, trying to imagine a regiment bedded down between the sculpted hedges.

“Damned lieutenant!” he spat. “They send me a boy when I need a man! There’s a war to win, you know!”

France isn’t at war right now. “Monsieur le Marquis?” Lili asked, not sure what to say to someone who had taken leave of his senses. He looked more closely at her, and for a moment Lili thought he might recognize her. Just then his attention was distracted by the cries of a middle-aged woman running across the lawn toward the garden. “Monsieur!” she cried out to him. “You’re not to go out like this! You could get lost!”

“Oh, shut your mouth! You’re nothing but an old nag.” The woman ignored him. “Come along,” she said, taking his limp arm. He allowed himself to be led back to the house without complaint, and when she had handed him over to a tiny young chambermaid, she turned to Lili.

“You must be the niece we were just told about. Which one are you?”

“I’m Stanislas-Adélaïde,” Lili said. The servant looked momentarily confused, as if she was trying to place the name. “I’m not really his niece,” Lili added. “I’m his daughter.”

“Oh dear,” the woman said. “I’m not sure this is good.” She looked around. “Come with me.” She took Lili around the house and down a slope to the basement entrance to the kitchen. “Wait here,” she said. “If someone asks who you are, say you’re my cousin.” She looked at Lili’s dress, which despite being crumpled and soiled was still obviously fashionable and expensive. “No one will believe you, but just keep saying it until I get back with Lucien.”

Left alone, Lili looked around the spacious kitchen. A huge fireplace filled most of one wall, surrounded by shelves and hooks loaded with gleaming copper pans of every imaginable size and shape. The aroma of wild boar wafted from a stew pot hanging over a fire in the hearth, and on a worktable in the center of the room a
loaf of fresh bread lay on a rack, next to a neat pile of vegetables still covered with bits of dirt. A larder door led to a room filled with an array of preserved and dried food, bags of flour, baskets of apples and onions, and special cupboards for cheese and pastries. In a separate area, eight places were set at the servants’ table.