Work Text:
I.
The first time she kisses him, it’s partly to shut Voltaire up. Not because his words are boring her; even at his most infuriating, nothing he ever says in all their years together will ever do that. Truth to tell, she’d fallen in love with his words to start with, and with that clever, clever mind, connecting paradoxes and compliments, talking as easily about the latest scandal as he does about English philosophers and German mathematicians. But the problem is that he’s far too much in love with the sound of his own voice as well. A kiss is the most efficient method to make him focus on her instead of the impression he wants to make on her, Émilie decides, and interrupts a sublimely witty verbal cascade with a silent exploration of her own. She gives him no warning, just leans forward and takes that next breath he draws into her own mouth.
For every action, an equal and opposite reaction. That’s what Newton says.
II.
He teaches her English, which Émilie learns quickly, though possibly not as fast as Voltaire himself did during his two years of exile in England. It turns out to be very useful to have a language for arguing and making love that hardly anybody else understands in French society. It’s also quintessential for studying those of Newton’s works which aren’t written in Latin, and here, it quickly turns out that as clever as he is, mathematics will only ever be a secret code to be deciphered with some effort for him. Whereas Émilie, who had not been allowed to study it as a girl and had since made up for lost time, translates the intricacies of Newton with the certainty of having found her purpose in life.
Writing a book together is a lot like having sex, Émilie concludes, in between debating and redrafting Voltaire’s attempt to introduce Newton to the French, and tells him so.
„Touching the divine and the ridiculous in equal measure, with a lot of second thoughts after the fact?“ he retorts, and hands over another cushion as he’s noticed her back is starting to ache; they’ve been working all through the night, and it’s almost dawn.
„It makes you feel alive like nothing else,“ Émilie says. „And then it makes you hungry.“
III.
She calls him V, which is her private, personal pun. Voltaire is what he calls himself, after all; his own creation of a name, fashioned out of the bourgeois François Arouet, son of a Parisian notary. He’s gotten everyone else to call him this, even those of the high nobility who would see him back in prison again sooner rather than later. No first name, no ancestral reference: just Voltaire. Émilie, born into the noble line of the Breteuils and married to the Marquis du Châtelet, is both amused and impressed by this kind of self-fashioned immortality. She still calls him V.
V for velocity; since taking up with him, her life has gained a madcap momentum, and she never knows where either of them will be a year from now, battling with the censors or throwing a challenge at the Academy, which will never, ever admit her, as Émilie is a woman, but may be tricked into publishing one of her papers. V, and that she would never tell him, for vie, life. It’s not that she had none before he came. She made a sensible match to a decent man who, once she’s provided him with an heir, lets her pursue her interests as he pursues his. She’s had two satisfying affairs, she had been studying long before Voltaire talked himself into her life. But. There’s a difference between lending her heart, and giving it away. Every particle may attract every other particle in the universe with a force that is proportional to the product of their masses, but then there’s the sense of being drawn, of rushing together, of gaining speed through motion out of proportion to just about everything sensible and settled. This is life. The living force. Force vive. Vis viva. V.
IV.
One of the most frustrating things about Voltaire is that he’s used up his common sense for his businesses, and has kept none for the practicalities of survival. Not that Émilie complains about his financial acumen. As opposed to every other writer she knows, Voltaire, as he tells her, decided early on that if money without talent is odious, talent without money makes for misery. After gaming the lottery, he’s made a small fortune with his investments. He’s the one providing the majority of the money they put into the old Châtelet country seat, Cirey, in order to make it a place where the two of them can work and live and enjoy themselves, he’s the one who buys all the books she can wish for and most of the instruments. But he’s absolutely incapable of not enraging any person with the power to ruin his life if she lets him out of her sight. Discretion and Voltaire are at best nodding acquaintances and will never be friends; when he’s supposed to hide while there’s a warrant out for his arrest, again, he manages a whole week before encountering a theatre which wants to stage one his plays, and ends up handing out autographed poems to the entire ensemble.
„Between the two of us, which one insists on infuriating Newtonians and admirers of Leibniz at the same time by claiming their theories are not mutually exclusive but can be used in a complementary fashion?“ he challenges when she chides him. „My dear, neither party will thank you. I myself find it incomprehensible that you’ve been lured fare enough away from Newton to find something attractive in that amalgam of German mysticism.“
Émilie spends the next hour explaining how much Voltaire misunderstands Leibniz and later concludes that his ability to distract her from a justified complaint is another most frustrating talent of his.
V.
They break each other’s hearts eventually, inevitably perhaps. Or is it pride that’s broken? That’s what he says, in one of their arguments.
She thinks it starts when he fails to win a competition of scientific essays she’s also entered, and begins to lose interest in science, once more devoting more and more time to poetry and history instead. No one can tell her these two events are unrelated. Then he tells her that he feels too old, too sick to have sex anymore. It’s true that he’s more than a decade older than her, and a hypochondriac to boot, but she still can’t help but see this as a rejection.
„Do you wish to end…“ she starts, forcing each word out of her throat, and he interrupts with what appears to be genuine panic and horror.
"No," he says, „no, never that. Émilie, I would not, could not live without you anymore than I could live without the air I breathe. It is a weakness of the body, that is all.“
She tries to believe him, right until she finds a letter, a love letter, and a graphic one at that. Evidently his body is not too weak to couple with another woman.
In earlier times, when she was especially angry with him, she’d gone back to spending a few nights with a former lover he increasingly dislikes, but they are past that now. She wallows some months in misery and far from him. Then, after their reunion, she falls in love with the most charming, young and dashing poet she can find.
„If this is your revenge, it is a petty one,“ he says, fuming, after coming across her and Saint-Lambert.
„As hard as you may find this to believe, it is not about you. He adores me,“ Émilie says with great satisfaction. „Besides, there is nothing you should mind. It leaves you more time to tend to your delicate health.“
VI.
They mend each other’s hearts, not least because for all that, neither of them leaves. He could; his most prominent admirer, the King of Prussia, has been trying to woo him from her side for fifteen years now. She could; Saint-Lambert would come with her, she’s sure of it, and her husband only accepted Voltaire for her sake anyway. But the fact of the matter is that she’s entering the most difficult stage of her most challenging work, the translation of Newton’s magnum opus, the Principia, with all its equations, from Latin into French. No one except for her has tried or even considered it, let alone added an explanatory commentary. Voltaire might have lost something of his enthusiasm for Newton, but he still sees the enormity of what she’s doing better than anyone else, and when she is either particularly troubled or proud of a passage, she can’t help herself; she has to read it to him. It’s still there, the spark in his eyes, the way he asks just the right questions to make her come up with an even better sentence. They look at each other; he’s smiling at her unabashed, without restraint, his look when he himself has just accomplished something major to his satisfaction, recites it to her and is sure that something lasting has just entered this universe. This admiration, turned to her. In this, he’s never lied to her. Something in her starts to heal.
Then she finds out she’s pregnant.
VII.
Émilie has birthed three children before, has lost one when he was still a baby. This will be her fourth child. But she’s more than forty years old now, and it’s been many years since her last pregnancy. This is not a calculation of probabilities she ever wanted to make.
Her husband, whose child this legally has to be, is his kind, steadfast self, as he returns to her side, shielding her from the ruin society and law would otherwise inflict. Saint-Lambert is somewhat nervous, but writes heartfelt poems about her sea-green eyes. He also makes a list of names, shyly, which is very endearing.
Voltaire is visibly scared.
„I have to finish the Principia before the child is here,“ she tells him. „The birth will break my concentration, and the weeks after. And you know how it is when one has to stop the flow of words and thoughts, and then later has to find one’s way back. Most inconvenient.“
„Very,“ he says. „Émilie…“
„So you’ll help me ensure this does not happen, V,“ Émilie says. „Let’s write. I bet you I’ll finish my translation before you finish your play. You just wait.“
The tiny muscles around his mouth move, and she can tell he’s about to say something. Something clever, undoubtedly, something moving, perhaps. Whatever it is, though, apology or explanation or vow, she does not want to hear it. Because there is still a lifetime ahead of her, more than enough for any words he might have to say right now, she needs to believe this, she will believe it, and so, in order to shut Voltaire up, she kisses him. For the last time.