“You mean Michon?” Lili asked. “The servants come to table here?” It was odd, but so much had already been different at Ferney that she supposed she should be open to anything.
“Of course not!” the young man said, in a tone that sounded like the snobbish tittering of Anne-Mathilde and Joséphine in the convent. “Madame Denis lives here. She’s Voltaire’s niece, who’s perfected on him the role of annoying wife her husband had the good sense to avoid by dying shortly after he married her.” Now Lili was certain she didn’t like La Harpe at all.
“Perhaps you’ve heard of my plays? Warwick? Timoleon? Pharamond?” the young man asked. “Warwick was quite the success, and Voltaire invited me here to help him correct some of his own verse.”
Lili shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I can’t place them.” This upstart says he corrects the work of the greatest writer in France? Lili wondered what Voltaire would say if he overheard such impudence.
“Timoleon and Pharamond—I can’t say I’m surprised you don’t know them. I’m afraid they were quite more than the French were prepared for, and I suppose I’ll have to settle for posthumous fame.” He laughed, as if he felt such modesty was charming in a man of his talents.
“What a shame you’ll never know if you achieved it,” Lili said, struggling to keep the bite of sarcasm from her voice.
“So you are the daughter of the Marquise du Châtelet.” La Harpe ignored her comment, giving Lili a look that lingered too long for comfort. “And special enough to have the whole house talking. You weren’t kept waiting in the antechamber for hours, like every other new visitor.”
Lili gave him the same kind of smile she had first practiced when trying to withstand the company of Jacques-Mars Courville. “Yes,” she said, about nothing in particular. “Perhaps you know my mother was the translator of Newton’s Principia.”
La Harpe looked confused. “Newton?” he asked in a way that
left Lili unsure whether he was merely surprised or had never heard of him. “I thought she was just Voltaire’s—”
He looked up and rose to his feet. “Madame Denis! How lovely you look,” he said, lifting the new arrival’s hand to kiss it. “Have you met Mademoiselle du Châtelet?”
What was the name of the fairy tale where the king was a scrawny little thing and the queen was so big she could barely fit on her throne? Lili couldn’t remember, but the middle-aged woman who had just entered the room fit the story perfectly. “Ah, oui,” Madame Denis said. “Monsieur Voltaire has been simply beside himself with excitement since he received your letter from Geneva.” She looked Lili up and down as if she were taking her measure. “Did you enjoy your walk?”
She is spying on me, Lili thought, feeling a crawling sensation along her spine. Before she could reply, Madame Denis turned away, as if it hadn’t been a question as much as a statement about her rule in the house. “Where is Father Adam?” she asked La Harpe.
“Still in the village, I presume,” he said, “elevating his favorite hostess.”
Madame Denis burst into peals of flirtatious laughter that made the fat under her chin jiggle. “Jean-François is such a clever man,” she said, turning to Lili. “Did you meet Father Adam yet? He’s a Jesuit who, shall we say kindly, has made up his own mind about which of his vows it pleases God that he keep, and since he is already sixty, he is making up for lost time. And my poor Monsieur de La Harpe has a lovely bride who has yet to manage to leave her bed since she arrived.” Madame Denis gave an insincere pout. “Dear little sparrow, our Marie Marthe.”
He’s married? Lili was sure the look he had given her was neither casual nor innocent.
“The poor thing is expecting, you know,” Madame Denis said, “and that can be terribly unnerving.” She laughed. “I’m afraid Monsieur de La Harpe and I are quite uninteresting by comparison, the only truly normal people here in this little menagerie.”
As normal as a jackal in a frock coat and a whale in a velvet dress, Lili thought, feeling a wave of protectiveness toward the old and frail-looking master of the estate. He lives with people like these?
The door to the library opened, and Voltaire appeared. His face lit up when he saw Lili. Ignoring Madame Denis and La Harpe, he came to her and took her arm. Madame Denis waited for La Harpe to take hers, giving him a look so intimate and flirtatious that Lili looked away to avoid being an unwilling voyeur. Poor man, Lili thought. Menagerie indeed.
LILI RUBBED HER
eyes as the stub of candle flickered. It was nearly midnight, and unable to sleep after such an eventful day, she had gotten up to read a book Voltaire had lent her from his library. His Philosophical Dictionary had just been published, he had told her, adding with pride that it had immediately been banned by the French censors and the church. She leafed through the opening entries, stopping at “Adam.”
“The names of Adam and Eve can be found in no ancient author of Greece, Rome, Persia, Syria,” he had written. “It must have been God’s pleasure that the origin of every one of the world’s peoples should be concealed from all but the smallest and most unfortunate part, for in the natural course of things one would think the name of the forefather of all should have been carried to the farthest corners of the earth. It must have required quite a substantial miracle to destroy all the monuments to him that must once have existed, and to shut the eyes and ears of nations to Adam’s story …”
He’s certainly clever, Lili thought, turning to a page in the middle. “Freedom of Thought,” she read. “‘I’ve been told,’ Inquistor Medroso said, ‘that the Catholic religion would be lost if people began to think.’ ‘How is that possible?’ Lord Boldmind asked. ‘If the church is truly divine, how could it be destroyed?’ ‘Well, perhaps not,’ Medroso added, ‘but it could be dangerously reduced. Look at Sweden, Denmark groaning under the burdensome yoke of thinking they no
longer need to follow the Pope.’ ‘I suppose one might see it that way,’ Boldmind replied, ‘but isn’t it true there would be no Christianity if the first Christians hadn’t had freedom of thought?’ ‘I don’t understand,’ Medroso replied. ‘I’m not at all surprised,’ Boldmind said. ‘It’s up to people to learn to think. You were born with intelligence. The church has clipped your wings, but they can grow again.’”
But you could have flown … She and Voltaire once had the same idea about ruined wings. Perhaps she had come to a place where she might be truly understood. She could sleep now. Ferney was already feeling a little like home.
“
COME VISIT ME
in my arbor this morning, Voltaire.”
Holding the note she’d received with her breakfast tray, Lili walked across the lawn toward a linden tree surrounded by a circular hedge. “Are you there?” she asked, calling through the entrance. When she heard his voice she stepped inside.
The dense mass of leaves formed a a roof over a dirt floor covered with pulverized rock. Voltaire was seated in one of a pair of chairs upholstered in red and gold brocade, set next to a wood-inlaid table on which lay a stack of letters. An oil lamp cast light to read by in the deep shade. To one side, a small secretarial desk and chair sat on a worn Persian carpet. If she could ignore the tree trunk in the middle, Lili thought, all that would be needed to complete the impression of being indoors were a few paintings hanging from the clipped hedge.
“Welcome to my hideaway,” Voltaire said, motioning to a lap robe covering his legs. “I hope you aren’t offended if I don’t get up.” He was wearing a loose coat that looked more like a dressing gown, and on his head was a scarlet turban onto which three or four caps in various colors had been perched. He was not wearing his wig, and fragile-looking wisps of white hair lay in unkempt straggles around his neck, but his eyes gleamed, untouched by sallowness or clouds.
“Do you remember the last line of my Candide?” he asked.
“How he finally gives up his illusions that this is the best of all possible worlds, and decides that the only thing to do is to cultivate his own garden.” He gestured around the clearing. “I guess you could say that’s what I’ve done here.” He gave her a wan smile. “I need asylum from my asylum. Everyone knows to leave me alone here, or else I’ll write something truly wicked about them.”
“I’m afraid—for reasons I haven’t yet told you—that I’ve fallen sadly behind in my reading in the last year,” Lili said. “Except for the Bible, of course.” She made a face to ensure he knew such limitations had not been by choice.
“Ah yes,” he said. “I must warn you that the bread you eat here will not be at all what the Lord commanded, though we have plenty of the main ingredient.” Seeing Lili’s puzzled look, he went on. “Take—what was it? Wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet?—and mix them together, and make bread with it. It sounds like something I’d rather feed my goats, but here’s the thing God says will make it really special.” He gave her a sly grin. “‘And thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man.’”
“No!” Lili’s mouth dropped open, and she made no attempt to close it.
“It’s right there,” Voltaire cackled. “I’m afraid I’m not one of those who carries a Bible around like a third testicle, so you’ll have to wait to check, but you can read Ezekiel chapter four in Latin, Greek, French, or English in my library.”
“Dung?” Lili hadn’t heard him.
He snickered. “‘In our sight,’ the Good Lord says, so we’ll all know exactly what we’re eating. But remember, God is known for his mercy. He said it would be all right to use cow dung instead. But he was firm on the rest—eat it for three hundred and ninety days and not one day less.” He grinned. “Aren’t you lucky you arrived on day three hundred and ninety-one? But perhaps that explains why the guests are so unpleasant to be around.”
“Eat dung? I’m not sure whether I want to laugh or cry.”
“Exactly,” Voltaire replied. “That’s why religion is the vilest
form of infamy. Can you imagine some poor soul, wondering why he is afflicted with gout, or whose drinking water is killing his children, thinking the remedy is to take Ezekiel’s advice about what will make God stop punishing him? Although I suppose we deserve whatever we’re willing to believe.”
He looked away with a bemused smile, remembering something. “Many years ago, I was living above a tavern with about ten other boarders, and the chaise percée sat over a pipe that went down past the tavern into—well, who knows?—somewhere underground. I was arrested for having written something treasonous, and the officer thought I was hiding copies in my room. I told him I had thrown my work down the privy, and do you know what that brainless toad did?”
Voltaire didn’t wait for a reply. “He went looking for it! By the time he was done, the pipe had burst and sprayed the people all over the tavern. And it was just about then, when he was standing covered in piss and shit—including mine—that he figured out there weren’t any papers there at all.”
“He never found them?”
Voltaire cackled. “I never put them there. I wanted to punish him for being in thrall to a government that would arrest me for writing what I thought.”
Lili shook her head slowly, marveling at his audacity.
“Why are you here?” Voltaire asked in a suddenly solemn voice.
“How nice it is to have forgotten for a little while,” Lili said, taken aback by the change in subject.
Voltaire rested one bony hand on his chest and massaged his chin with the other as he listened without comment to her story about her impending marriage and her trip to Cirey. “We shall have to think of something,” he said when she had finished. Setting aside the lap robe, he got slowly to his feet. “Would you like to take a walk? It always helps clear my mind.”
“Perhaps I could stay here at Ferney for a while,” Lili thought aloud, as they walked in the direction of a little church she had noticed on the grounds. “I can copy in a good hand, and Madame Denis
might like to be relieved of some of the burdens of the house …” She saw a smirk flit across Voltaire’s face at the mention of the corpulent niece who called herself his housekeeper but whose two burdens seemed to consist of ensuring personally that there was no food left uneaten at any meal and making Monsieur de La Harpe feel witty. “It would be temporary, of course,” Lili added, “but it would keep me from having to go back to Paris in a few days and choose a husband.”
“Nothing would be more charming, my dear,” Voltaire replied, stopping at the gate to the churchyard. “But it would be best if your name did not become associated with mine. Although with the gossip-mongering that goes on in this house, it may already be too late for that.” He stopped to look at her. “Besides, I think the solution to your problem may be right under your nose. You just haven’t seen it yet.”
Lili opened her mouth to ask what he meant, but he was already pointing to an inscription above the door of the church. “Deo erexit Voltaire.” he said. “Do you know what that means?”
“Voltaire erected this to God,” Lili replied.
“That’s what it says, but what does it mean?” Voltaire was too impatient to wait for her to think. “It means that I did it to honor God, not to snivel before some saint the church tells us will have a chat with God on our behalf.”
“You built a church?” The incongruity was so great that it pushed all other thoughts to the back of her mind.
“Not exactly,” he said with a rueful look. “I rebuilt a church. I thought the old parish church spoiled the view, and since it was on my property I tore it down. I figured nobody would mind. After all, I was building a new one with my own money just a few paces away for all the poor cannibals of this village who believe they can’t live—or I guess can’t die is more like it—without a taste of their Savior’s flesh and blood every week. But the bishop decided to punish me for not asking his permission by insisting that I build the new one right where the old one was. So yes, my dear Lili, your friend Voltaire built a church.”
He looked around. “It’s a shame Father Adam isn’t here at the moment. I’d like you to meet him. He’s my other revenge besides the inscription. Adam’s been defrocked, but he says mass anyway, and it makes me feel a bit better that the people who use my property for such foolishness at least aren’t being lied to in sermons quite as badly as they might be by a priest who actually believes all that nonsense.”