Voltaire in Love (2 page)

This mix of a dream of Arcadian love with the pursuit of scientific
experiment had long been part of the fantasy-fabric of French literature. The ancient, sly philosophe Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, who makes a couple of cameo appearances in this book, had already published in 1686 his beautiful
Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds,
in which a fictional marquise and her lover-instructor take on the difficult scientific doctrine of the “plurality of worlds”—quite as difficult as, and very similar to, today's string-theory doctrine of the multiverse of many hidden dimensions—and manage to arrive at both an affair and an understanding. Voltaire and Émilie took this poetic dream and realized it as no lovers had before. Passionate themselves, they made what they pursued seem passionate and human. They made Newton seem exciting. The intimacy of their address is part of the intensity of their achievement.

The tone of Mitford's book suggests this thought with the lightness of touch the thought demands. Her book
is
unapologetically full of gossip—on the homosexual nature of Frederick's court, the mistresses of Louis XV. It's also unashamedly full of the details of decor. Mitford quotes at length a memorable, contemporary account of the rooms where the marquise did her Newtonian experiments:

Voltaire in Love
still stands as a portrait of the French Enlightenment as it really was, with intrigue and idealism in strange but fizzy solution. Why did Nancy Mitford have the insight into the nature of French intellectual life denied to so many others? Many English people live for a long time in France, and though they often love it, they rarely “get it” in quite this way. It may be significant that
all
of
the Mitford girls had to go elsewhere to find an identity. Aristocrats raised aristocratically, they “took” better elsewhere than in England: Unity pitifully and horribly in Germany, Jessica in America. France saved Nancy, much the best pure writer of the sisters. She grasped, and sets out here in exquisite detail, the other side of the constant vendettas and intrigues of Parisian life. She saw the workings of a society rooted in a set of manners designed, at whatever cost in truthfulness, on making other people feel comfortable and valued, a set of manners based on compliments and what the English call “affectations.” For every conspiracy Voltaire enters into against an enemy, he offers some extravagant compensatory compliment to a friend. (His enemies get them, too, when it's tactically worthwhile.) This is not at all the English way, where the aim always seems, to this outsider at least, gleefully to create the maximum sense of social discomfort at every moment for the other guy, even if the other guy or girl is a friend. “But you look ravishing,” a modern marquise says when a mother with a newborn child comes looking haggard to the Paris drawing room, and she means it. “Nursing mothers have the most beautiful skin: the fullness of your bosom would look insipid if you were as naïvely beautiful as you were before.” And not only does the nursing mother feel more reassured, she feels that she is interesting. (“Yes. You do look peaked,” is the English equivalent.) Once, I heard one of the heirs of Voltaire return a toast at a New York dinner party. “You are not friends—you are my brothers and my sisters!” he announced to the puzzled room. A month or so later an English novelist of similar stature was feted at the same table “It's someone's turn every week to sit here and be toasted, and I'm glad this week it's mine,” said the English novelist, half rising and then sitting down as he spoke. It's easy to see which model, candor to the point of discomfort or courtesy to the point of absurdity, is likely to make for sharper satiric fiction—but it's also easy to see which makes for a more enviable civilization.

It is her ability to draw and appreciate this civilization that makes Mitford almost alone among English writers. In her vision of
the French Enlightenment, Voltaire's compliments can be as extravagant as his conspiracies, and serve the same end: making social life into a constant theater of excitements, marked by that interchange of ideas and views and passions that, as Jürgen Habermas still insists, is what made the French Enlightenment matter. The idea of human liberty and the rights of man are inextricably tied up with the practice of backbiting and venting and writing duplicitous letters to apparent friends. Yet—and this is perhaps the crucial thing—where in the despotic world judgment takes the form of physical suffering, in the new world that this book inhabits condemnations are
only
words. The torrent of bitter words is comic because nobody is going to die from them. For all the bitterness they induce, they are still just words on paper—and choosing mock violence over real violence is exactly what it means to be enlightened.

Voltaire in Love
is a small-scale masterpiece of antiheroic history. The two lovers live here. They were silly, petty, adolescent, impulsive, self-deluding, took absurd revenges for imagined wrongs, and lived lives of privilege and luxury; they were also wise, sublime, adult, saw much farther than their contemporaries, and helped advance the human spirit. Judith Zinser's fine, recent biography of the marquise was given the slightly too-prim editorial subtitle: “From a Life of Frivolity to the Life of the Mind.” Nancy Mitford's book reminds us that while it is always the purpose of pedantry to expand that difference, the purpose of a civilization is to reduce it until it becomes too small to see.

—
ADAM GOPNIK

To
Victor Cunard

I owe an enormous debt to Mr Theodore Besterman. Although he does not, I think, quite approve of this enterprise, he has helped me in every possible way. I have had access to all the material in his possession including the newly-discovered letters from Voltaire to Mme Denis which reveal the full extent of their clandestine love affair. Mr Besterman also had the goodness to read my book in typescript and to make many valuable comments on matters of fact and style.

Comtesse Carl Costa de Beauregard had me to stay at beautiful Fontaines where I wrote much of the book. I am also grateful to Signor Cipriani and everybody at Torcello where I worked for two months. M. de Gandarillas in whose house at Hyeres I also worked was a very kind host as always.

Comte Jean de Baglion and Princess Chavchavadze lent me some scarce and valuable books. The Librarian of the London Library has been kind and helpful; so have Mr Heywood Hill, Mrs St George Saunders, Miss Irene Clephane, Comte Charles de Breteuil, and Mr Roderick Coupe. Miss Henrietta Lamb found most of the illustrations for me.
*

*
The original illustrations have been omitted from this edition.

There are many hundreds of books about Voltaire. This one is not a biography, still less a study of his literary and philosophical achievements (which would indeed be above my station), but simply an account of his relationship with Mme du Châtelet. Voltaire's work as a reformer only began after her death. His campaigns for the rehabilitation of Calas and Lally Tollendal; his contributions to the
Encyclopédie;
his quarrel with Jean-Jacques Rousseau;
Candide
and his reiterated ‘
Écrasez l'infâme'
all belong to his old age.

In order to reduce the number of footnotes I have put the full names and dates of the characters in the Index.

The love of Voltaire and the Marquise du Châtelet was not an ordinary love. They were not ordinary people. Voltaire's
Mémoires
begin with their meeting which he regarded as the turning point of his life: ‘I found, in 1733, a young woman who thought as I did, and who decided to spend several years in the country, cultivating her mind.' It is rather mysterious that he had not found her sooner, for they moved in the same world; his father was her father's man of affairs; the Duc de Richelieu, one of his greatest friends, had been her lover. Voltaire used to say that he had ‘seen her born' but this was a literary convention he often used; another one was ‘he (or she) died in my arms'.

However, as soon as they saw each other, the famous love affair began and was soon announced. Love, in France, is treated with formality; friends and relations are left in no doubt as to its beginning and its end. Concealment, necessitating confidants and secret meeting places, is only resorted to when there is a jealous husband or wife. The Marquis du Châtelet always behaved perfectly.

Writing to Cideville, companion of his schooldays, Voltaire said of Mme du Châtelet: ‘You are a male Émilie and she is a female Cideville.' He could not have praised her more highly, for Cideville was one of his great friends. So frivolous, so volatile in his likes and dislikes, Voltaire was unshakeable in friendship. He also compared her to Newton, the master of his thought. He said that though she was a genius and inclined to require a metaphysical approach at moments when it is more usual to think only of love, she fully understood the art of flirtation. From the first he wrote
of her, in letters to his intimates as well as in the many poems he addressed to her, as Émilie. This was another literary convention; in those days Christian names were not used, even between brother and sister, and Voltaire certainly never spoke to her as anything but Madame. Sometimes, in his writings, she is Uranie, because Mme du Châtelet, though she moved in the thoughtless circles of high society, was learned and a scientist. The Breteuil family, whose glory and whose shame she is, speak of her to this day as Gabrielle-Émilie, her real name.

While Voltaire's friends were left in no doubt as to the new relationship, Mme du Châtelet herself went even further. She declared that she was planning to spend the rest of her life with him. Among the first to be informed was the Duc de Richelieu. We do not know when and how the news was broken to M. du Châtelet.

The lovers were not young. Voltaire was thirty-nine, Mme du Châtelet twenty-seven. She had been married eight years and was the mother of three children, one of whom was only a few months old. Each had had a chequered past. Émilie was a passionate creature, excessive in everything. Her physical attraction for men was not great enough for the demands of her own nature and this often made her restless and unhappy. To look at she was quite unlike the general idea of an eighteenth-century Marquise. Mme du Deffand, who never forgave her for carrying off the greatest entertainer of the age, has left a description of her which is certainly too catty but may have some truth: thin, dry, and flat-chested, huge arms and legs, huge feet, tiny head, tiny little sea-green eyes, bad teeth, black hair, and a weather-beaten complexion, vain, overdressed, and untidy. Cideville, on the other hand who, like most of Voltaire's men friends, was attracted by Émilie, speaks of her beautiful big soft eyes with black brows, her noble, witty and piquant expression. Calling on her one day and finding her in bed, he wrote:

Over and over again she is described, in letters and memoirs of her day, as beautiful; reading between the lines one can conclude that she was what is now called a handsome woman. She was certainly not a beauty in the class of Mme de Pompadour, nor, in spite of a great love of dress, was she ever really elegant. Elegance, for women, demands undivided attention; Émilie was an intellectual; she had not endless hours to waste with hairdressers and dressmakers.

She was born, 17 December 1706, a Le Tonnelier de Breteuil. Her immediate ancestors had risen to power and riches in the magistracy. France was governed by such families, many of which had plebeian origins whereas the Breteuils were of the minor nobility. The great territorial nobles had had their wings cut by Louis XIV and now, powerless but decorative, they only had two professions open to them: the Court and the Army. Magical Versailles was their reward for this loss of power; a hundred useless privileges bolstered up their pride and self-esteem. They heartily despised people like the Breteuils, whose men-folk had administrative posts at the Court, but whose women never went there. Madame de Créquy says that it was during a long visit to her cousins the Breteuils that she learnt not to mention the
noblesse de robe
(the nobles of the magistracy) without first looking round to see that none were present, as one does with hunchbacks and redheaded folk.

The Paris society in which Émilie grew up was extraordinarily democratic. It consisted of the magistrates and the
fermiers-généraux,
each with a circle of friends and dependants. The
fermiers-généraux
ran the country's finances and made enormous fortunes for themselves in the process. They often came from the lowest strata of society. Old Poisson, Madame de Pompadour's father, once burst out with a vulgar guffaw, at the dinner table of one of these magnates: ‘I can't help laughing when I think that if a foreigner dropped into this party he would take us for an assembly of princes! Yet you, M. de Montmartel, are the son of an inn-keeper; you, Savalette, the son of a vinegar merchant; you, Bouret, the son of a servant, and as for me – everybody knows what I am!' Yet Poisson's daughter was one of the most civilized women of her time.