July 1778
T
HE SOAP
bubble grew larger and larger before it drifted off across the lawn of the Château d’Étoges toward a girl with a halo of reddish-gold curls, and another with tresses so dark that in the bright summer sun they seemed tinged with blue. They giggled as they waved at the bubble to keep it afloat. “Ahh,” Charles-Anne Clément de Feuillet, the nine-year-old future Comte d’Étoges, grimaced when it disappeared in a wet pop.
“Make another!” the fair-haired girl, his older sister Julie, called out to him.
“Oh yes!” Emilie Leclerc clapped her hands. “Another—and another after that!”
Charles-Anne groaned as if he were quite beleaguered to be in the service of two girls, but he dipped his wand and started again.
In the afternoon light, the purple foliage of a magnificent copper beech created a pool of shade where Lili and Delphine sat. “Julie is becoming quite the young lady,” Lili said, watching Delphine’s eleven-year-old daughter practice dance steps on the newly mown grass, the outline of her legs faintly visible under her gauzy muslin dress. “Indeed,” Delphine said. “It’s really astonishing how quickly time has passed. I was just a few years older than she when I started thinking that all I really wanted in life was to get married.” She
shook her head. “It seems so different when it’s your own child. I feel like saying, ‘Don’t you dare grow up until I’m ready.’”
“And I’m certainly not ready,” Lili said, watching her own eleven-year-old daughter trying to persuade Delphine’s son to give the metal straw and vial of soapy water to her. “Emilie’s a little tiger,” she said. “If she wants something, she won’t let go. And I, for one, am happy that she’s still got her nose in her books most of the time, and doesn’t talk about wanting to grow up at all.”
She laughed. “Emilie cares even less about hats and dresses than I did. Do you remember getting your wardrobe for Versailles? How Maman and I were about ready to drag you out by your heels, we wanted so badly to go home?”
Delphine chuckled. “Julie’s like that. Now that I’m on the other side, please accept my apology. I must have driven you to distraction about so many things.” Her eyes took in both girls. “It’s quite something, isn’t it—we have girls a few months apart in age, just like us? And they’re different in the same ways, but they love each other.” She reached for Lili’s hand, not needing to say the rest.
“And luckier in some ways. They have fathers who adore them …” Lili’s voice trailed off. The visit to the marquis at Cirey still hurt her to think about more than a decade later, and when he died a few months after she left, she had felt only a brief moment of sadness. As for her true father, shortly after her marriage she had arranged to meet Jean-François de Saint-Lambert. He seemed as unenthused about her as she was about him, and after making an insincere pledge to remain in touch, they had said good-bye with great relief and made no further effort.
By now, Charles-Anne had gone off to a small spring-fed pond and was lying on his stomach, reaching into the water to grab the turtle he called his pet. Emilie remained behind, sitting on the grass with her skirt billowing around her, blowing a bubble and taking the pipe from her mouth to examine the small, iridescent orb before it floated away. Lili gestured in Emilie’s direction. “She’ll ask me a million questions tonight,” she said. “Just how I imagine her grandmother as
a child.” She supposed it would never go away, the twinge of sadness that Emilie’s grandmother would not be pulling up in her carriage for a visit with her namesake, not see her turning out in so many ways to be just like her, from her raven-black hair to her insatiable curiosity.
Lili looked out across the lawn to the château where she and her children spent every summer with Delphine, now the Comtesse d’Étoges. The small but elegant mansion was surrounded by a moat, patrolled by three white swans and a family of ducks. Emilie and Charles-Anne’s tutor Anatole was in a rowboat, making the circuit around the château with two boys, aged six and four.
Anatole, a distant cousin of Jean-Étienne’s, had come into their lives when George-Louis, the older of the two boys in the boat, was born, and Lili realized she could not continue schooling Emilie herself. Anatole was more like a part of the family than an employee, and in Paris, when he was not teaching the children, he worked just for the love of it in the laboratory Jean-Étienne had set up in one of the buildings at the Jardin de Roi. Like Jean-Étienne, Anatole was the odd one in his family, intensely intelligent and progressive in his thinking, more concerned about science than status.
Emilie had been taught solely at home, first by Lili and then by Anatole, and never spent a single night at a convent. Instead, for two years she had gone with her best friend, Julie, one day a week for catechism at an Ursuline convent near Hôtel Bercy. From Emilie and Julie’s secretive giggles and imitations of the nuns, Lili was quite sure the church had made little progress in impressing upon them the importance of submission and piety for future wives and mothers of France. It was important to be sufficiently informed to make one’s way in a society shaped by the church, Lili and Delphine both felt, but their children could choose for themselves what to believe.
The two boys in the rowboat were as blond as Emilie was dark—the image of their father, with skin so fair their noses and cheeks were covered with freckles within days of their arrival at Étoges.
Georges-Louis looked up and saw her watching them. “Maman!” he called out. “There’s fish in here, and Anatole said he’d make me a net to catch them!”
“That’s wonderful!” Lili called out. The younger one tried to stand up to wave. “Be careful, François! Georges—hang on to your brother!”
She had named them Georges-Louis and François-Marie, after the two men who had meant the most to her during her struggle with Baronne Lomont. The baronne was dead now, having failed to wake up one morning the previous winter. Her death was followed only a few months later by Buffon’s in April, and Voltaire’s in May. Lili and Jean-Étienne were pleased that both men had a chance to see while they were alive how lovingly they would be remembered.
Buffon had been buried, as he wished, not in the Pantheon but a day’s coach ride from Paris, on his country estate at Montbard. Voltaire had been staying in Paris at the hôtel of the Marquis de Villette when he was struck by his final illness—this one all too real—and he had been unable to return to Ferney. Lili had gone several times in his final days to be by his side. His last conscious act was to wave away the priest who had come to hear his confession, before turning his back to reject the last rites of the church. “Let me die in peace,” she had heard him say.
That was less than two months ago. A coach had set out with his body for Ferney, but the weather was too hot and the embalming inadequate for the journey. Somewhere along the way the stench grew too great, and now he lay, buried quickly under the stone floor of an abbey church in a town Lili had never heard of. She couldn’t decide whether, if Voltaire knew, he would laugh or cry.
The village of Étoges was probably much like that town, little more than a row of buildings on both sides of a dirt road. The château was on a small rise, making it possible to look out from the lawn and see every cart that came along the road, filled when Lili arrived for the summer with vegetables and fruit, and by the time she left in the fall, with the first of the grapes that would be turned into champagne
by the vintners on the estate. Since Étoges was not on a road connecting any cities, only the occasional coach announced itself by the clouds of dirt kicked up behind it.
Today, just such a billow of dust appeared beyond the formal gardens on the far side of the grounds. Delphine saw it first. “I think they’re here!” she said, getting up. In a matter of minutes, a dusty black coach came through the gilded entry gate. Charles-Anne jumped up and joined Emilie and Julie, who were already running toward it. Anatole was rowing furiously toward the tiny dock, with the two boys bouncing in their seats.
“Papa!” they all cried out, stumbling to get there first as they ran across the gravel courtyard to the coach. Ambroise opened the door before the coachman could do it for him and stepped down into the group of excited children. Charles-Anne grabbed his father around the waist, bouncing up and down, while Julie wrapped her arms around him from behind.
Walking arm in arm with Delphine, Lili watched for her first glimpse of her husband. As Jean-Étienne’s head appeared in the open door of the coach, Lili felt the familiar leap of her heart. I love him, she thought to herself, smiling with beatific warmth as she watched her little boys run across the drive to him, while their daughter grabbed both his hands in hers and jumped with delight.
“All right, mes chéris,” Jean-Étienne said. “Maman’s turn.” He took Lili in his arms and squeezed her tight. “Umm,” he said, stepping back to look at her at arm’s length. “The air at Étoges certainly agrees with you,” he said, giving her a brief but affectionate kiss. “You look lovely—and I cannot wait until tomorrow, when I can join you over there on those chairs and recuperate from that awful Paris heat.” The expression in his eyes said privately to Lili how much he looked forward to something else, just between them, that would take place before then. He looked down at his daughter. “The smell’s been brutish this last week, ma petite,” he said, wrinkling his nose in disgust and pinching her nostrils.
“Papa! Papa!’ The boys were tugging at his coat. Jean-Étienne
picked up first one and then the other, holding the little one out for a spin before pulling him close. “I’ve missed you all so much!” He kissed Jean-François on the cheek before putting him down, and turned to gaze at Lili with a look that said he knew he was the luckiest of men.
They turned to walk toward the house. Ambroise was arm in arm with his wife, his children chattering noisily beside him. He reached over to put his hand gently on Delphine’s stomach. “How is the new one?” he asked.
“Asleep,” she replied, and then gave a little start. “Not anymore. I think we’re all glad you’re home.”
“Papa, what did you bring me?” Julie asked, dancing backward to walk in front of him.
“Ribbons for your beautiful hair,” Ambroise replied. “And a music box.” With his other arm, he pulled Charles-Anne closer to him. And for you, mon fils, that little telescope you wanted.”
“A telescope?” Emilie broke in. “Can I look? Maybe we can find Saturn tonight!”
Delphine was right, Lili knew. The day was not that far off when she and Jean-Étienne would need to discuss their daughter’s future. Watching Emilie and Charles-Anne jumping up and down about the telescope, it saddened her that he was too young for her. Perhaps the beautiful and happy children crowding around their father and uncle in the courtyard could be spared the agonies all four of them had endured. She and Jean-Étienne, like Delphine and Ambroise, were doing their best to make a good life for their children, but in the end, as for everyone else, happiness was something they would have to achieve on their own.
“What did you bring me, Papa?” Emilie was asking.
“Just what you asked for,” he said. “Monsieur Voltaire’s L’Ingénu—and enough sugared almonds to make your mother complain they’ll make you sick.” He grinned at Lili, who gave him a poor excuse for a scowl. “I read it on the coach—I hope you don’t mind. It’s about a Huron Indian who comes to live in French society. It’s really quite funny—and a bit sad.”
Emilie got up on her toes to kiss his cheek. “Merci, Papa.”
He smiled at her. “You’re welcome, my treasure. Perhaps I should have brought you a few new handkerchiefs too, to use while you’re reading it. I’m sure you’ll cry at one part.”
“Book cries are the good kind, Papa,” she said, swinging his hand. By then they had reached the house. They went through the vestibule, greeting Corinne, now the head housekeeper at Étoges, as she came down the marble staircase from the upper floors. “It’s a pleasure to see you, messieurs. I’ll bring some biscuits and coffee to the parlor,” she said with a curtsey before hurrying off.
“Can I play the piano for you, Papa?” Julie asked, taking off her sun hat. “I’ve learned a new piece by Mozart.”
Ambroise stroked her flattened hair. “I’d love to hear, but your uncle and I want to talk with Aunt Lili and your mother for a little while first.”
Anatole gestured to the children to come to him. “Time for your dinner,” the tutor said.
Julie groaned. “Can’t Emilie and I stay with you?” she pleaded to her mother. “We want to eat with the grown-ups.”
“Soon,” Delphine said, looking up to catch Lili’s eye. Soon enough, their glance conveyed. “You can come back in when the little ones are down for their nap.”
“And we can start L’Ingénu upstairs after dinner,” Emilie said to a pouting Julie. “I’ll read to you if you want.”
“All right,” Julie said with a dramatic sigh, as she and Emilie went off to catch up with the others.
The downstairs maid came back with coffee and a plate of small pastries. “Let’s hear all the news!” Delphine said as the coffee was served and the sweets were passed. “People first, then politics,” she said in a teasing tone that nevertheless conveyed who set the rules of conversation at Étoges.
Now that he was the count, Ambroise was at Versailles quite often and on his visits to Paris he spent time at the salons. Lili and Delphine knew he could be counted on to come back with information
so fresh some people in Paris might not yet know it. “The big news,” he said, “is that Joséphine de Maurepas is now a widow. She’ll stay in the Auvergne at her château until fall, but renovations have begun on a hôtel she bought in Paris. All the talk is of the great expense she’s incurring, and from the letters she’s sent to friends inquiring about the most fashionable tailors and milliners, it’s quite clear she intends to be a happy widow indeed.”
“And what does Anne-Mathilde think of all this?” Delphine asked. Far away from the excitement of Paris, Joséphine had had plenty of time to wonder how she had ended up in a place as remote as Ferrand, with a dull and rather crude husband twice her age. When she finally realized Anne-Mathilde’s treachery, she had broken off all contact with her, and the two were renowned for the way they snubbed each other whenever Joséphine was in Paris.