Voltaire in Love

218 Pages·2012·1.38 MB·English

by  Nancy Mitford

NANCY MITFORD (1904–1973) was born into the British aristocracy and, by her
own account, brought up without an education, except in riding and French. She
managed a London bookshop during the Second World War, then moved to
Paris, where she began to write her celebrated and successful novels, among
them The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, about the foibles of the
English upper class. Mitford was also the author of four biographies: Madame de
Pompadour (1954), Voltaire in Love (1957), The Sun King (1966), and
Frederick the Great (1970)—all available as NYRB Classics. In 1967 Mitford
moved from Paris to Versailles, where she lived until her death from Hodgkin's
disease.
ADAM GOPNIK has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1987, writing often
on French life and literature. His many books include Paris to the Moon, an
anthropology of modern French manners, and The Table Comes First, an essay
on the philosophy of eating. He has also written introductions to new editions of
works by authors such as Balzac, Alain-Fournier, Hugo, and Maupassant. In
2012, Gopnik was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France.
OTHER BOOKS BY NANCY MITFORD
PUBLISHED BY NYRB CLASSICS
Frederick the Great
Madame de Pompadour
The Sun King
VOLTAIRE IN LOVE
NANCY MITFORD
Introduction by
ADAM GOPNIK
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 1957 by Nancy Mitford Introduction copyright © 2012 by Adam
Gopnik All rights reserved.
First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton, 1957
Cover image: Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Cupid and Psyche; © RMN-Grand Palais
/ Art Resource, NY
Cover design: Katy Homans
The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows: Mitford,
Nancy, 1904–1973.
Voltaire in love / by Nancy Mitford; introduction by Adam Gopnik.
p. cm. – (New York Review books classics) Includes bibliographical
references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59017-578-1(alk. paper) 1. Voltaire, 1694–1778—Relations with
women. 2. Du Châtelet, Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise,
1706-1749.3. Authors, French— 18th century—Biography. 4. Scientists—
France—Biography. 5. Mistresses— France—Biography. I. Title.
PQ2103.D7M52012
848'.5O9—dc23
[B]
2012019447
ebook ISBN: 978-1-59017-593-4
v1.0
For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com
or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
Contents
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
VOLTAIRE IN LOVE
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Author’s Note
1. Voltaire and Émilie
2. The Young Voltaire
3. Voltaire in England
4. Émilie Inherits Voltaire
5. The Richelieu Wedding
6. Cirey
7. ‘Les Amours Philosophiques’
8. Frederick Appears on the Scene
9. Exit Linant, Enter Mme Denis
10. The Battle of Desfontaines
11. Mme de Grafigny’s Story
12. Various Journeys
13. Frederick Comes to the Throne
14. Voltaire Fails for the Académie Française
15. Voltaire and Frederick
16. A Happy Summer at Cirey
17. Voltaire at Court
18. The Philosophers in Bad Odour
19. An Invitation
20. Lunéville
21. ‘Sémiramis’
22. Miscellaneous Works
23. ‘C’est vous qui me l’avez tuée’
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
Introduction
Voltaire in Love, first published in 1957, is Nancy Mitford’s retelling of the
story of the fifteen-year-long love affair between Voltaire, the dominant writer
of the European eighteenth century (“No man has ever had so much fame in his
lifetime as Voltaire,” said Dr. Johnson, no admirer), and the Marquise du
Châtelet, known as Émilie, an aristocrat who by an exemplary act of will made
herself an important scientist and philosopher at a time when women were not
expected to be either and were most often mocked when they managed it.
Mitford’s story is really two stories: One tells how Voltaire and Émilie
worked together, mostly at her château in Cirey (with her patient, cuckolded
husband in odd, spare-bedroom attendance), to bring Newtonian science to
Cartesian France, producing both scientific papers and a masterpiece of popular
explanation, her translation of Newton’s Principia. The other, counterpointed
story tells of how they came, truly, to love each other—a love at least briefly of
the body as well as of the mind and soul, and how that love worked its twisted,
original, difficult way to a decent, amiable conclusion in friendship. It’s a
relationship that anticipates many other love affairs in succeeding centuries
between smart spoiled men and bright difficult women. “That lady whom I look
upon as a great man,” Voltaire wrote of her. “She understands Newton, she
despises superstition and in short she makes me happy.” George Eliot and
George Henry Lewes, Chopin and George Sand, J. S. Mill and Harriet Taylor—
all those other love affairs where mind and body got twisted together in a pretzel
of passion and philosophy are prefigured in this first one.
That sounds quite grand, but when Nancy Mitford decided to tell their story
grand was the last thing she made it seem. Voltaire in Love was one of a series of
popular histories of French figures that Mitford wrote for a mostly English, and
then later American, audience after her arrival in Paris during the 1950s, where
she lived at 7 rue de Monsieur, in the heart of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. She
had come to live in France in order to be near her “Colonel,” Gaston Palewski, a
brave Gaullist whom she had met in London during the war. She was madly in
love with him, and he, more sporadically, was in love with her. Installed in
France with an existing reputation for madcap, borderline Wodehousian novels
about her bizarre upbringing as an aristocratic Englishwoman, she began to earn
a living by writing popular books of French history. She wrote books about
Madame Pompadour and Louis XIV and, here, about Voltaire. (A small literary
tribute: I made my own image of Mitford in Paris into the heroine of my
adventure story The King in the Window, in the person of Mrs. Pearson, and
gave her the same Paris address.)
Mitford’s books about France were offered, and patronized by critics, as “pop
history,” drawn from what academic historians call, primly, “secondary
sources,” that is, accounts by other historians. This is a practice that sounds easy
and is in its way as hard as archival research, since it involves selection and
decisive reshaping from a literature already overabundant—topiary trimming
rather than spadework. She recognized Voltaire himself as a master of this kind:
“He thought that an historical study should be composed like a play, with a
beginning, a middle and an end, not a mere collection of facts: ‘If you want to
bore the reader, tell him everything.’”
The play she chooses to put on is a comedy, at times a farce. Her Voltaire, and
to a lesser degree her marquise, are mostly ludicrous in their relation with each
other and often ridiculous in their appearances in the world. Mitford’s Voltaire is
genuinely in love, and, after his forced sojourn in London in the 1720s, really
did see that Newton’s grand, universe-spanning physics had an explanatory
power that Descartes’s alternative physics, dominant in France, with its cosmic
“whirlpools” and “vortices,” lacked. (Though, as Mitford shrewdly remarks,
Voltaire’s liking for English politics, liberal at least compared with French
autocracy, and his desire to shake up his countrymen’s fatal complacency, had
something to do with this apostasy.)
But his actions in this book are taken up less in watching the stars and
calculating their paths than in the furious pursuit of his literary enemies here on
earth, and mostly in Paris. Detailed accounts of long-forgotten literary
conspiracy and vendetta, at once remote in their particulars and entirely familiar
in their shape, fill the book: Voltaire gets engaged in squabbles with a now
forgotten writer and editor, the Abbé Desfontaines, whom he thought a monster
of ingratitude and a “sodomite” besides, feeds his own publisher with work that
he is later outraged to see in print, libels other writers mercilessly, and then
shrieks with rage—and even goes to law—when he is libeled and mocked in
turn. Chapter 10 alone gives a perfect picture of the bewildering, incestuous,
farcical feuding that still remains a constant of French intellectual life: Mme. du
Châtelet writes a letter to Mme. de Champbonin asking for her support in
Voltaire’s latest literary war, and she in turn writes to The-riot, who pities
Voltaire but refuses to sign his petition, and, it turns out, is, shockingly, going to
publish his own letter to Mme. du Châtelet in a competing paper run by the Abbé
Prevost. “More rivers of mingled ink and tears flowed to Paris from Cirey” is
Mitford’s dry comment.
Mitford understood the life that ran on the banks of this “river of mingled ink
and tears” as well as any outsider to it ever has; she grasped the exasperating,
irresistibly tiny nature of much French intellectual life. Yet she also saw that
those little village fires could cast a global light. For her point throughout is that
the pettiness and even occasional maliciousness of Voltaire’s nature was no bar
to the seriousness of his achievement. Mitford understood—partly by instinct,
partly by firsthand experience of a Faubourg Saint-Germain social life that had
not really changed all that much since the eighteenth century—that the things
that make Voltaire and the marquise seem petty were inextricably part of what
made them great. Where more conventional historians try to race us past the
drawing room (and the bedroom) toward the library and the laboratory, Mitford
grasped that the silliness and the sublimity (and the sex) were all linked. Voltaire
in love helped light the world.
There are, to be sure, very big things at stake in this book. Though Voltaire’s
life with Émilie predates his days as a dissident and human rights campaigner,
their advocacy of Newton’s physics was, intellectually, at least as courageous.
Indeed, bringing Newton to France was a more formidable challenge than
Mitford, no scientist herself, quite grasped, since Newton’s system, with its
theory of gravitation demanding instant invisible action at enormous distances,
in many ways looked to the French “occult,” where Descartes’s omnipresent
“vortices” (Mitford calls them, nicely, “whirlpools”) were, though invisible, still
mechanical, with each one physically touching the next, like cogs in clockwork
wheels, from here on to eternity. Newton’s physics were a challenge not just to
Gallic pride but to French logic. Yet the lovers struggled and succeeded in
making these strange English ideas not merely lucid but even, in their way,
fashionable. (Modern scholarship has helped us to see more clearly that it was
the marquise who had much the deeper grasp of the physics and was much the
more active intellectual principle of the pair.) Voltaire and Émilie demonstrated
to France that the scientific imagination could be part of the social imagination,
one more thing you wrote about to friends and talked about at dinner, and that
this might be the best way to make converts to the cause of English-style
experimental empiricism (and by implication to the English style of
parliamentary politics).
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:
. . . a tiny boudoir, one could fall on one’s knees it is so pretty, panelled in
blue with a ceiling by a pupil of Martin who has been working here for the
last three years. Each panel has a picture by Watteau. There is a chimney-
piece with brackets by Martin, which have pretty little things on them, and
an amber ink stand sent with some verses by the Prince of Prussia.
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: