Voltaire falls within the “three fact” range of my knowledge—that is, I knew roughly three things about him before I read this book. Lived near Geneva, wrote Candide, a satire of naïve optimism, and was a defender of human rights. Much of my store of knowledge is in the three-fact category: Alexander the Great: conquered the world from Greece to India in the 3rd century B.C., died young, was gay. Or How about … The Dreyfus Affair: French military officer, anti-semitism, Zola involved (“J’accuse”). I could go on.
I guess I can also admit to also knowing that Voltaire was the personifying genius of the French Enlightenment, much as Samuel Johnson was the personifying genius of the English Enlightenment. But 300 years and a language puts Voltaire at a significant remove, and though I wish I could have learned enough French to explore a bit of 18th century French literature on my own, I’m pretty sure at this point that that’s never going to happen. So, when all else fails: popular history.
Nancy Mitford is a fascinating character in her own right, one of a trio of aristocratic British sisters who all made some sort of mark on the world in the mid 20th century. (Unity Mitford was a devoted Nazi who moved to Germany and had intimate suppers with the Fuhrer.) Nancy was a novelist turned biographer who, while living in France in the 1950s, managed to make a living writing biographies of such luminaries of the Ancien Régime as Louis XIV and Madame Pompadour. The image I had of Voltaire is of a dandy in a shiny powder blue coat with a white periwig and rouged cheeks. Probably I am conflating Voltaire with Candide in this image, but I was surprised to find that Mitford’s Voltaire was a pretty close match with my notions of an 18th century French intellectual: vain, supercilious, given to feuds and disputes, and promiscuous. These people went at it like cats! Voltaire had an assortment of enemies. Who has enemies anymore? Such an extravagance! Voltaire was all about extravagance.
I like biographies, but conventional biographies can be a bit oppressive due to the inevitable arc of an eminent life: obscurity, followed by fame and accomplishment, followed by decline and extinction. I must admit to sometimes flipping to the final pages of biographies when I’m browsing in bookstores to take in the deathbed scene. It’s typically about 10-15 pages from the end. (Has anyone ever anthologized deathbed scenes? Maybe it would be considered bad taste?) So yeah, biographies are like suitcases—you can pack different things into them, but they always have the same shape.
Which is why I like one-off biographies. Partial biographies, group biographies, whatever gets you away from the bell curve. Voltaire in Love is both a partial biography, covering primarily a 15-year swath of Voltaire’s life, and a joint biography, covering as well his sometime lover and close associate, Émilie, the marquise du Châtelet.
They were both geniuses, though not of the exact same type. He was a playwright, poet, and satirist. A very public intellectual. He could not live anyplace for very long without improvising some sort of a theater and producing amateur productions of his own works. This may sound insufferable, but they were usually good plays and it was the 18th century—the alternatives were embroidery and card games.
Émilie had a more mathematical mind. She translated the works of Isaac Newton and championed his theories in France, where they had to compete with an earlier cosmology, formulated by Descartes and based on “vortices.” If you suppose this to have been a slam dunk for Émilie, you would be wrong, especially in light of the fact that the leading minds of the time were skeptical that a woman could teach them anything about such weighty topics.
Which one would you imagine would have a way with money? Turns out it was Voltaire:
Voltaire was now very rich. His fortune came neither from his books, which were too often pirated, nor from his plays, whose royalties he always gave to the actors, but from astute business dealings. He would exert himself to any extent, he would rise from a sick bed and travel across France, if he saw a good profit to be made. He had no wish for money troubles in addition to all his others and used to say that a man should live to work but not work to live. On one occasion, by a simple calculation which others had overlooked, he discovered that whoever bought up a certain percentage of a public lottery would win, in prizes, much more than the money laid out. He raised enough cash to do this. The minister of finance was furious when he realized what had happened, and tried to bring a lawsuit, but he had no case against Voltaire who was perfectly in order. On another occasion he went the whole way to Lorraine from Paris to subscribe to a State loan which seemed very advantageous. When he arrived in Nancy, ill and shaken by the journey, he discovered that only native Lorrainers were eligible. He made such a song and dance that the authorities allowed his subscription on the tenuous grounds that his name, Arouet, was the same as that of the Prince de Beauvau’s castle near Nancy, Haroué. This investment trebled in a few months.
He could have been on CNBC! Émilie by contrast was a gambler who could lose money as fast as Voltaire could make it.
Reading of their 15 years together induces a kind of exhaustion. So many quarrels, affairs, letters, recriminations, reconciliations, and alliances. People come and go, suppers are consumed at all hours, carriages break down, tears are shed, it never stops.
