Finding Emilie (47 page)

By now they had reached the other side of the church, where the land fell away in a gentle slope, revealing vineyards, pastures, orchards, and fields of vegetables and grains. “This is what I live for now,” Voltaire said. “I’m rich, you know—the château, and the town and all the land around it belong to me. I can’t think of a better use for my money than to make this little bit of France a better place. When I bought Ferney, the land was too marshy to cultivate. Now the marshes are drained and there are new farms. There’s a watchmaking factory, and other new businesses that bring income to the village. Life is better now—more orderly, cleaner, safer. I’ve given up on changing the world but I can change this.” His face flushed with pleasure. “We must cultivate our garden, you know.”

He took a quick look back toward the château. “We should go,” he said. “It must be almost time for dinner.” His laugh was gleeful. “Good thing I’ve trained everyone to wait.”

“Would you mind if I borrowed a copy of Candide while I’m here?” Lili asked, taking his arm as they turned back. “I’m feeling dreadfully ignorant.”

The old man smiled. “I would be most pleased. But there’s something else I think you should read first.”

E
MILIE DU
Châtelet stopped writing for a moment as she felt the baby move inside her. She rested her hand on her bulging stomach. Only three months now. Work on the Principia was going well, and she had time to write something else. She wasn’t sure why she felt driven to write down her personal philosophy when there wasn’t even enough time to deal with weightier things. A little piece, this “Discourse on Happiness” admittedly was, not even meant for publication, although of course when she was dead, she wouldn’t care what happened to it.

“People commonly think it is difficult to be happy, and many reasons can be shown to justify this belief,” she had written a few days before. “But the truth is that it would be much easier to be happy if people tended toward self-reflection, and if a plan of conduct preceded their actions.”

Voltaire would be interested in reading what followed, although there wasn’t anything she said that they hadn’t discussed at one point or another. “It’s up to us to make our passions serve our happiness”—surely he would find no argument in that, although he might be displeased at how frankly she had written about the end of their affair and the pain the loss of his affections had caused her. Saint-Lambert as well—he should get a copy, since the misery he’d left in his wake had certainly helped to hone her thinking.

“It isn’t enough simply not to be unhappy. Life would not be worth the trouble if absence of dolor were the only goal. Truly, non
being would be preferable, since assuredly that is the state in which we suffer the least. It’s necessary, instead, to strive to be happy.”

Her dear friend Duke Stanislas would understand that. He, more than anyone, knew how to make the effort required to live well. No wonder her friends would rather spend time at his provincial court at Lunéville than at Versailles. Once she was a little further along in her work on the Principia, she would be leaving Paris to go to Lunéville with a few companions to help her through her lying-in and the birth of her child.

A fourth copy for one of those friends, Marie-Victoire du Thil, who so many years ago had insisted on stopping by Voltaire’s boardinghouse so she could taunt him with being the second-most-intelligent person in Paris. How different her life would be if she had never met him!

“We are made happy in the present not just by the pleasures we experience at the moment, but by our hopes for the future and our reminiscences of the past,” she wrote. “Appropriate self-love in contemplating these things is the wind that fills our sails, and without which our ship could not move forward.” It was good to feel she had done well with the life God had given her. Though she doubted her future, the desire to speak from beyond the grave was more than wind filling a sail. It was a bellowing gale that made the rigging scream.

A new friend, Julie de Bercy, would be accompanying her to Lunéville as well. Being so young and with so much to learn, perhaps she would like to read it too. Baronne Lomont of course would not. Now there was someone whose goal in life seemed to be quite the opposite of happiness, rejecting joy and pleasure with dour sanctimony, like a magnet repelled by the force of another. Baronne Lomont would be at Lunéville too, having invited herself as insurance that no one enjoyed themselves too much.

Emilie shrugged. “It would be better to figure out how to be happy in the situation we face than try to change it,” she wrote. The trick was to be happy whatever one’s lot. Baronne Lomont was her sister-in-law, her husband’s brother’s widow, and since there was no
way to rid her life of such a grim-faced bore, she should endure her company as best she could.

Emilie would keep a copy of her “Discourse on Happiness” for herself, of course, and have one more made, in case she had forgotten someone. She felt as if she had. Whoever it was would come to her in time, and then she would offer up her little work, in bound leather with a ribbon for her to keep her place, as if she had intended to give the book to her from the beginning.

Her place? Emilie thought for a moment. Why was she sure the person she’d forgotten was a woman?

The baby moved again. “Quiet now,” she said. “Maman has to write.”

1767

H
OW COULD
Voltaire be so cruel? Lili set the ribbon at her place and put the book down. It would be better to figure out how to be happy in the situation she faced than try to change it? The happiest people were those who desired the least change in their lot? How could her mother say such terrible things, and why would Voltaire want her to know she had? Her mother wasn’t happy with her lot, and she hadn’t just gone along …

My mother is a hypocrite! The thought stung, as surely as if it had stood up and slapped her.

“Beg pardon, mademoiselle.” Lili heard Justine’s voice behind her. “You’ll be late to supper if you don’t go down.”

“Please say I’m indisposed,” Lili said. Please say I think I’m suffocating. “I’ll ask for a tray later if I’m hungry.”

The dining room was directly below her bedchamber, and she could hear the guests being seated. Madame Denis’s and Voltaire’s voices were the easiest to pick out, but La Harpe was there too, as were a man she assumed was Father Adam and a woman who must be La Harpe’s phantom wife finally up from her bed. The sounds of silverware clinking against plates and the jocular conversation, lubricated by the tasty wine from Voltaire’s estate, rose up to Lili’s room.

Lili didn’t hear. The book compelled her to open it again. “The foremost thing is to be well decided about what one wants to be and what one wants to do,” her mother had written.

As Lili read on, the words jumped out at her as if they had been shot from cannons. Shaken, she put down the book again and went to the window. She had been wrong about what her mother had meant. She isn’t saying to accept Baronne Lomont’s ideas for my life, Lili realized. She’s saying the opposite—that I can’t expect to be happy if I do. She’s telling me to be who I am. That’s the lot I can’t change.

The first boom of thunder from a summer storm crackled in the sky, and she felt the cool, charged air on her face. “Who I am—that’s the lot I can’t change,” she repeated aloud.

A sudden gust of wind rattled the pages of the open book and she picked it up again. “Without knowing yourself, there can be no real happiness,” she read. “You’ll swim perpetually in a sea of uncertainty; you’ll destroy in the morning what you made the evening before; you’ll pass your life making stupid mistakes that you will then try to repair or repent.”

Don’t be afraid of what you want. How can you be happy without the courage to acknowledge your dreams? Her mother’s message burned through her so personally that at any moment Lili thought she might turn the page and see her name. Set your sights on what you can hope to have and do not settle for less, she was telling her. Unreasonable hopes will make you miserable, but reasonable ones can shape your life, if you have the courage to listen to them.

Lili was sure she felt the soft whisper of a woman’s voice. “Don’t give up now,” it said. “Go find out who you are, and then you will know what you need.”

GERMOND STOOD ON
the far side of the salon, just outside Voltaire’s bedroom. He bowed stiffly to Lili as she approached.

“Is he all right?” she asked, holding the note Louise had delivered to her bedroom the following morning.

“Quite, I’m sure,” Germond said. “But rainy nights in the summer always leave his chest feeling tight, and he believes it wise to stay in bed the next day. One can’t be too careful, you know.”

“I hear you out there!” Voltaire called from his bedchamber. “Bring Mademoiselle du Châtelet in!”

He was sitting up in bed, wearing a thin muslin nightshirt and a length of soft, cream-colored wool that had been wrapped several times around his head and secured with a twist and a tuck at the crown. His coffee and a crust of bread had been pushed aside on his lap tray in favor of the Parisian journal he had been reading.

“How are you feeling, Monsieur Voltaire?” Lili asked, approaching the bed.

“One never knows,” he said, holding his thin fingers to his chest. “These summer storms create miasmas that can bring the most dreadful diseases into the house. I shall keep my head warm”—he patted his turban—“and be quiet as a mouse all day, and perhaps nothing will find me.” He gave her a toothless grin. “I thought perhaps you might be willing to sit with me for a while. We’re too far from Paris for tongues to wag about you being in my bedroom.”

He looked toward the door. “Germond!” The valet was immediately in the doorway. “Bring mademoiselle some breakfast.”

Before she could sit down, Voltaire pointed to a painting on the wall opposite his bed. A rosy-cheeked woman in a blue, ermine-trimmed gown looked out with an expression that was at once haughty and slightly mischievous. “Do you recognize her?”

Lili moved toward the portrait. “My mother?” She turned back to see him nodding.

“Marianne Loir caught her spirit,” he said. “And her beauty. It’s my favorite portrait of her.”

Lili stood, taking in every detail. “I’ve never seen anything larger than a miniature,” she said, “and that only once.” She leaned in to look more closely. “What color was her hair? I can’t tell with the dusting of powder.”

“As black as a raven,” Voltaire said. “Do you see what she’s holding?”

“A compass and a carnation.”

Voltaire smiled. “She had the portrait painted for me. I knew
what it meant the minute I saw it. She was offering me her passion—that’s the white carnation—but at the same time the compass was telling me she would never let anyone interfere with her right to use her mind. And of course that was what I loved most about her.” He paused. “Did you read the book I gave you?”

Lili sat in the chair closest to the portrait, where the air felt bathed with her mother’s presence. “More than once.”

“Apparently I didn’t incur the complete loss of your affection by letting you read about me. I’m afraid I didn’t always behave well, and I certainly was never much of a lover,” Voltaire said with a rueful smile, “although I suppose it’s in poor taste to offer any of the details.”

Germond came in with a tray, relieving Lili of the awkwardness of a reply. She took a sip of coffee. “She said happiness involves both living passionately and being able to let go when the passion is no longer there.”

“Yes, and isn’t that the trick—the letting go? We were truly excellent friends, far more satisfying than being lovers, but I don’t think she lived long enough to take her own advice about Monsieur Saint-Lambert.”

Saint-Lambert. “I saw his portrait in a drawer at Cirey,” Lili said. “I’ve been trying to accept that the man I always assumed was my real father has no blood connection to me at all, and that the man who is my father gets up in the morning and takes coffee just as I’m doing now.” A lump grew in her throat. “And that neither of them feels anything for me”—she swallowed hard—“or I for them.”

She caught a tear before it could fall. “I take it,” Voltaire said, “that the last part is something you’d like to convince yourself of.” He passed her a neatly pressed handkerchief from a stack on his bedside table.