Finding Emilie (45 page)

“When I was little, I thought the Milky Way looked like a horse that had galloped off to another galaxy, and all we could still see was its tail.” Emilie laughed, watching her breath cloud in the blue-black night. Voltaire pointed overhead. “It’s no wilder an idea than thinking those stars are an archer named Orion—as if objects in the heavens stay in their appointed spots to make a good story for us.”

“And then Galileo brandishes his telescope and asks a simple question: what would happen if we preferred the truth?” Emilie said. “And voilà, that smear across the sky reveals something more wonderful than anything we could imagine.”

She was silent for a moment. “I wonder what people who come later will think of us,” she said, resting her head against his shoulder. “The truths we’re too stubborn to accept, and the lies we’re too frightened to abandon. We’re so adamant about moving away from superstition and alchemy, but wouldn’t it be wonderful to catch a glimpse of what we’re wrong about, however hard we try not to be?”

Voltaire laughed. “Painfully wrong sometimes, if I recall a certain
on fire whose greatest merit apparently lay in giving my critics something to disparage.”

Emilie scarcely heard. “It’s not impossible to send objects into space, you know.” She sat up, not noticing the cold. “If a projectile could be launched at a speed great enough to get beyond the earth’s gravity near the top of its arc, it would keep going unimpeded in the same direction—it would either circle the earth or go on out into space forever. I’m sure it’s so.”

“Or until it ran into something,” Voltaire teased. “Don’t forget that, Madame Newton. Perhaps it might collide with people who’ve launched themselves out from another galaxy. I hope they’re a better creation than we’ve turned out to be.”

“Proof that God had been equally busy elsewhere.” Emilie laughed. “Imagine the stir that would cause!”

“I think There’s plenty keeping God busy here,” Voltaire replied, reaching up to tap a finger against her temple. “Sometimes I imagine him saying, ‘Finally, here’s someone to talk to! Someone who understands me, if only just a little.’ He is a man, you know, and all any of us really want is to be understood.” He grinned, pulling her down to lie next to him. “Me most of all.”

Under the blanket, Emilie poked him in the ribs. “Stop it!” she said, secretly pleased at the compliment. She turned her face toward his and saw that his smile was gone.

“You are the closest thing to the divine I have ever known,” he said. “And I can’t imagine wanting to feel such love for another, for fear it might cause my memory of you to fade.”

When the warmth of his compliment had died away and he released her from his embrace, Emilie spoke. “God teases us with that sky,” she murmured. “He says, ‘My creation is too vast for you to comprehend, but I want you to try anyway. I want you to keep looking for me.’”

The bleakness she felt so often now crept back into her mind. Death was God’s cruelest joke. He made people go through life knowing they would not have enough time. “I want to live forever,” she whispered, too softly for Voltaire to hear.

They lay quietly, watching the stars creep across the sky. “Your eyes are sparkling,” Voltaire said, breaking the silence.

She laughed. “How can you tell in the dark?”

“I don’t have to see them to know.” He squeezed her hand under the blanket. “Even if you weren’t here, I would know that wherever you were, your eyes were giving off the fire that makes you who you are.” Emilie burrowed in next to him, wishing that everything about that moment—the brightness of the stars, the sting of the cold on her cheeks, the man holding her in his arms—did not conspire to make her feel as if she might dissolve from grief.

1767

“I
’
LL SEND
my carriage to fetch you in Geneva,” the note resting on the seat beside Lili said in the scrawled and unsteady hand of the seventy-two-year-old Voltaire.

She had written to him from her lodgings in the city and, to her great relief, had gotten a reply so enthusiastic it did much to displace what felt like unremittingly ugly memories of Cirey. Perhaps someday she would be able to look back and think about her mother’s boudoir, the theater, the bathtub, the worktable, without immediately remembering the horrible scene that had ended her time there, and the way she had struggled all the way to Geneva to rid herself of the idea that she ought to feel guilty about a situation that had wronged her more than it did anyone else.

She touched the outside of her bodice, feeling underneath it the pouch in which she carried the prism she took as a gift from her mother. Let the marquis think I’m a thief, she thought. I’m glad I kept it. She felt a surge of bitterness, and with the rote reaction of her convent years, she offered a silent prayer for forgiveness. He’s just a confused old man. It’s bad enough being trapped inside himself without me wishing him any more pain.

The carriage came to a stop and she heard Stephane’s voice as he hopped down on the gravel courtyard and opened her door. The château, modest by comparison with any she had seen, gleamed in the morning sunlight as if it were radiating warmth from within. The
portico, faced in warm yellow sandstone, framed a large outer door where two servants waited. In tidy symmetry under the gray mansard roof, window shutters opened up onto the white stone exterior of the two-story building, as if every room were inviting her to come inside.

“Mademoiselle du Châtelet?” A man dressed in red and white livery bowed to her after Stephane had assisted her to the ground. “I am Germond, Monsieur Voltaire’s valet. It is a pleasure to welcome you to Ferney.” He looked around. “Dunan! Pernette!” The two servants standing by the door rushed to the carriage and began setting Lili’s trunk and boxes on the ground.

A stout woman in her forties came through a door in one wing of the house. Wiping her hands on her apron, she approached Lili and curtsied. “If you please, I am Michon, the housekeeper, and I hope that we shall be able to provide what you need for a most amiable stay,” she said in a well-practiced tone. “Perhaps mademoiselle would care to retire to her room for a rest after her journey?”

Before Lili could reply, Germond shook his head. “Monsieur Voltaire asked me to bring Mademoiselle du Châtelet to him in the library the minute she arrived.”

Lili caught the surprised look on Michon’s face before the servant lowered her head. “Very well,” Michon said, gesturing to Dunan and Pernette to take the things from the carriage into the house. Stephane jumped to help Dunan with the trunk while Justine followed, carrying Lili’s satchel. “We eat dinner at two,” Michon said. “Louise—she’s the upstairs maid—will make sure you have everything you need.” Then, after another curtsey she hurried off behind the others.

The air felt clean and cool inside the château, as if the patterned marble walls and floor imbued a serenity too great to disturb even a speck of dust. “This way, mademoiselle,” Germond said. “We’ll go to the library through the salon, so you’ll know where to join the others before dinner.” He opened a door on the far side of the vestibule and waited for Lili to go through.

Her eyes had barely adjusted to the dim light of the entryway before
they were squinting again in the dazzling sunlight of the parlor. Dreamlike landscape paintings set in gilded frames softened the plain, cream-colored panels, and the gleaming wood of the chairs and bright red patterns of the carpet were reflected in the mirrors on each wall. Lili’s eyes took all this in only slightly, since her attention was immediately drawn to what lay beyond.

The far wall of the salon was almost nothing but windows and glass-paneled doors opening onto a parterre that led down to a small formal garden splashed with beds of flowers. Sunlit streams of water arched and fell from a fountain into a marble pond in the center. Raked gravel paths connected the house to the woods beyond and radiated out to each corner of the garden. It was so unlike the grounds of Versailles and Vaux-le-Vicomte in its warmth and intimacy that Lili knew instantly she was going to like Ferney, in spite of the desperation that had brought her there.

“Mademoiselle?” Germond was standing in front of a closed door to her left.

Voltaire’s library. Lili’s heart jumped as Germond tapped his knuckles on the door before opening it and motioning her in.

The walls were covered floor to ceiling with crowded bookcases interspersed with large windows that flooded the room with light. A sticklike man, barely taller than she was, stood on a private terrace looking out over the vineyards toward the distant outline of Mont Blanc and the Alps. “Beg pardon, monsieur,” Germond said. “Mademoiselle du Châtelet is here.”

Voltaire turned around. “Mon Dieu,” he said, coming through the door toward her. He raised her hand to his lips with a bow.

“Germond!” he said, giving Lili a wide, toothless grin. “Tell me, have you ever seen me tongue-tied?” Lack of teeth gave him a speech impediment so severe it might have passed for self-mockery if it were not so obviously beyond his control.

“Non, monsieur,” Germond replied in the flat tone of a lifelong servant. “Shall I see to coffee?” Voltaire nodded, and the valet withdrew.

Lili averted her eyes from Voltaire’s penetrating gaze, struggling to control her recoil at the sight of a man who looked as wizened as a mummy and seemed to be made of nothing but bones. He bore no resemblance to the pictures she had seen, except for the old-fashioned powdered wig that brushed his shoulders, and the equally outdated cut of his frock coat and decorated jabot underneath. I didn’t expect him to be this ancient, she thought.

The sparkle in his eyes soon made Lili put aside his odd appearance, peeling away the present so she could see in Voltaire someone who had once been young. Before he spoke again, she was already warming to the man who had captured her mother’s heart so many years ago.

Voltaire led her to a small couch and settled with a wince into the chair across from her. “You are so like her,” he said. His voice caught in his throat and he cleared it noisily, pulling out a handkerchief to wipe the thin line of his lips. “It’s been eighteen years now. I was thinking of that when I received your letter from Geneva. The heat of the summer always puts me in mind of that time.” He shook his head in disbelief. “And here you are, the living embodiment of what those years mean. Already a lovely young woman.”

“I hope I haven’t hurt you somehow by coming, Monsieur Voltaire,” Lili said. Suddenly she realized he was crying, and her own repressed tears broke out too, as they laughed at themselves for weeping so unabashedly in front of someone who was, after all, still a stranger.

Michon returned with a tray on which sat a small pot of coffee and two tiny porcelain cups, along with a basket of fresh madeleines redolent with the smell of butter and sugar. “It’s midday, monsieur,” she said. “Will you be taking a walk before dinner?”

Voltaire looked at Lili. “If Mademoiselle du Châtelet would care to accompany me?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.

“I’d be delighted, but don’t I need to dress for dinner?” Lili smoothed her skirt.

He cast a quick eye over her tidy but corsetless traveling dress.
“Were you planning on going for a swim in my carp pond?” His eyes crinkled in a smile. “Because if you do, I most certainly will insist you come to the table dry, but other than that, you look quite dressed to me.”

Voltaire’s laugh was like a cross between a child’s giggle and the bellow of a bullfrog in a summer pond. “I am far too distant from Paris to care a whit about such things, and I try my best to drive off guests who do.” He stood up and motioned to her to come out onto the terrace with him. “So please, my dear, just be yourself. It’s hard to imagine anything else could be half so charming.”

His weight on her was like a feather that had fallen on her sleeve, as they stepped arm in arm off the terrace onto a path that disappeared into a grove dappled with autumn light.

LILI MADE HER
way to the salon a few minutes before the appointed hour and found the room still empty except for a man in his twenties reading a book. He jumped to his feet and kissed her hand with the exaggerated bow of an actor. “Jean-François de La Harpe,” he said, in a tone that suggested she should recognize the name. “And you must be Mademoiselle du Châtelet.”

“Am I early?” Lili asked. La Harpe laughed. “Since you’ve just arrived today, you don’t know yet that Monsieur Voltaire has a habit of keeping everyone waiting, so of course, no one ever comes down on time—which makes it necessary to push back dinner a bit more, just to make sure he still keeps everyone waiting. I imagine it will be a good ten minutes before Madame Denis appears, and Father Adam will come dashing in even later.”

Despite what she had to admit was a handsome face and a natural ease of manner, Lili was well on her way to disliking him. Why would the first thing he said be tinged with criticism of his host? Cleverness at the expense of gratitude didn’t speak well of anyone.

And who were these other people he’d spoken of? “Madame Denis?” Lili inquired.

“Monsieur Voltaire’s housekeeper.” La Harpe smirked.