Finding Emilie (38 page)

The Comte d’Étoges went to a sideboard as the group applauded. “A toast to Monsieur and Madame Clément de Feuillet,” he said, lifting a bottle of wine.

Delphine by then had risen and accepted a delicate kiss on the cheek from Ambroise. “Does this mean we’re married?”

“I think so,” he replied, looking to the notary.

Seeing the man nod, Delphine turned around to look for Lili. “I’m married,” she said, bursting into tears as she bent toward her as far as her massive panniers allowed.

“My fairy-tale princess,” Lili murmured into her ear. “You made your dream come true.”

“And it will be your turn now,” Delphine said, pulling back to look at her. Her face grew solemn as she bent in again toward Lili. “I
promise,” she whispered. “With all my heart. I swear I’ll do everything I can to see you as happy as I am.”

THE FOLLOWING EVENING
, after the nuptial mass to sanctify the marriage and a dinner hosted by the Comte d ‘Étoges, a few of the guests went back to Hôtel Bercy to escort Delphine and Ambroise to their marriage bed. Since unmarried women were not included, Lili said her good-byes and went with the baroness back to Hôtel Lomont, where she would stay for another week to give the bride and groom a chance to be alone, before moving back to Hôtel Bercy herself.

Darkness had fallen by then, and they rode back in silence. “You do realize that you cannot stay at Hôtel Bercy forever,” Baronne Lomont said. “It’s acceptable for now, but what about when they go to Château d ‘Étoges, or travel abroad? You can’t stay alone there as an unmarried woman, and you can’t follow them around wherever they go. Or is that what you intend?”

“I hardly think that having a sister close at hand early in a marriage is a detriment, Baronne,” Lili said into the darkness. “I imagine she will be glad for someone to talk to, someone who doesn’t have her own husband or household to concern herself with.”

Baronne Lomont sniffed in disapproval. “I could have expected as much, I suppose, trying to make excuses sound like virtues.”

“If you mean my refusal to marry, I intend to wait only as long as it takes to find someone I believe will support my interests.”

“And what might those be? Did your visits with the Comte de Buffon make you imagine yourself a scientist? Or perhaps you fancy yourself a novelist, with your scribbling.” Though she could not see the baroness’s face in the shadows, Lili imagined her lip curling with scorn.

“I don’t want to fight with you, Baronne Lomont,” she said, feeling a sudden wave of exhaustion, “but that seems to be all we do.”

Baronne Lomont was silent for a moment. “We will stop fighting, Stanislas-Adélaïde, when you accept your destiny.”

Lili sat up, feeling the hair rise on her arms. “Tell her she knows nothing about your destiny,” the air around her seemed to be saying.

I’m still afraid of her, Lili argued back.

“Don’t be!”

Lili took a deep breath, but as she exhaled, she lost her nerve to speak. After all, what did she know about her destiny, except what she hoped it wasn’t? She took in a second deep breath.

“You’re as strong as you need to be,” the air commanded, and the words spilled out.

“I’m an author,” she said. “That’s what I intend to do with my life. And I hope to pursue science as well.”

“An author?” The baroness’s voice curled up with astonishment.

“I’m not just amusing myself with my writing. I’m destined to do it,” Lili said, surprised at the strength in her voice and wishing she were as convinced as she was pretending to be. “Your low opinion of the story you found is not shared. I have been published in the Galette d’Amsterdam. Perhaps you have heard of Monsieur Tellechat?”

“I don’t read such drivel!”

“I am Tellechat,” Lili went on. “Monsieur Diderot tells me I am all the rage.” It wasn’t exactly true, but the baroness would not know otherwise.

“Monsieur Diderot?” The baroness was aghast. “I should have known nothing good would come of growing up in a house with a salon.”

Lili ignored her. “I have copies, if you’d like to see. I’ve hidden them from you because you made it necessary to be deceitful. I’ve also hidden a supply of ink and paper Delphine bought for me after you refused to let me have more.”

They had turned onto a lamplit thoroughfare, and a shaft of light came through the window, illuminating the baroness’s face. Her dark hat and cloak left the rest of her in deep shadow, and the pale light could not reach all the crevices of her thin face, making her appear momentarily like a disembodied skull floating in midair. Lili’s heart skipped a beat at what seemed like an evil apparition from a fairy tale.
I’ve had enough of your poison, she thought. And you have no more power over me than I allow.

The light faded and the coach was again in shadows. “I will marry someone who suits me when I believe the time is right,” Lili said. “And I’m not discussing it again.”

“Is that so?” The inflection of the baroness’s voice sounded oddly musical, as if something had just given her immense delight. “I’d like you to come with me into my study when we get home,” she said. “I have something to show you that I believe will put an end to this rebelliousness once and for all.”

THE LETTER WITH
its broken seal was the sole object on the table next to Baronne Lomont’s favorite chair. She picked it up and turned to Lili. “Sit down, Mademoiselle du Châtelet.”

The formality of that name was unnerving, but Lili pressed her feet into the carpet to remind herself to stand strong. “I would prefer to stay where I am,” she said in a clipped voice. “It’s been a long two days seeing Delphine married, and I’d like to go to bed as soon as you’ve shown me whatever it is you want me to see.”

“As you wish,” the baroness said with a hint of a smirk, handing her the letter. “It’s from the Marquis du Châtelet.”

“A letter from my father?” Lili’s heart pounded as she opened the tightly folded single page.

My Dear and Esteemed Sister-in-Law,

I received your letter inquiring as to my wishes in regard to Stanislas-Adélaïde after the regrettable death of Madame de Bercy. I do not wish to be involved in the search for a suitable husband, and I leave it to you to arrange for her marriage, which I agree should take place as soon as possible.

I have sent to my lawyer by separate post the document you asked me to sign, and you should by now have the legal authority to make
such decisions on my behalf. Please be advised that in the negotiations attendant to marriage, you should not represent that there will be a dowry from me, since I do not plan to add anything beyond the stipend she presently receives from the rents on one of my properties.

Lili stared at his unfamiliar signature, penned with a flourish below the text. “So you see,” the baroness was saying. “I have put an end to your foolishness, just as I said.”

Lili stared at the words swimming on the page in front of her. “Does this mean I must marry Monsieur de Barras?” she said, feeling life flowing out of her as surely as if the letter had cut a mortal wound in her flesh.

The baroness sniffed. “Monsieur de Barras tired of you during your absence at the abbey, and he is betrothed to another. I have two suitable husbands in mind, but neither has anywhere near the same fortune—regrettable for you, but entirely your fault. They are noblesse d’épée, however, and that will help your situation.”

I am doomed, Lili thought, wishing she could simply refuse to breathe again and die right there in the baroness’s parlor.

“I have agreed to let you move to Hôtel Bercy because I am too old at this point for the burden of having you live with me. However, I will permit this only so long as you give me your word before God that you will accept the first suitable offer of marriage you receive.”

Lili’s heart had been pounding when she read the letter, but now, much like that of a mouse she’d once seen squeezed to death by a snake in Buffon’s laboratory, it slowed until she was not sure it was beating at all. “Apparently I have no choice. I will have to do as you wish.”

“Before God, Stanislas-Adélaïde,” the baroness reminded her. “Give your word before God.”

Lili’s knees shook. How will I ever get out of this now? she wondered. “You have my word before God,” she replied.

“T
OSS IT
higher, mon chéri—and as hard as you can this time.” Emilie watched her eleven-year-old son cock his arm back and throw a ball into the cloudless afternoon sky. “Watch it come down and tell me what you observe.”

Florent-Louis shielded his eyes and watched the ball’s motion until it landed farther down the lawn at Cirey. He ran over to where Emilie sat under a tree. “You’re right, Maman,” he said. “The arc as it comes down is the mirror image of how it went up.” Emilie opened the notebook on her lap. “Now if you throw it just as hard, but higher”—she drew one arc and superimposed a steeper one—“it will still come back down the same way.”

“Why, Maman?”

“Because that’s the nature of an object set in motion against a force of gravity too strong to resist. You can use Newton’s and Leibniz’s calculus to determine the exact trajectory any ball would follow. A cannonball going up like this”—she drew a curved line—“would come down like this.” She drew another arc. “Or, if you aimed the cannon higher, it might come down like this. You can use the calculus to know the exact path.”

“But why does it matter, Maman?”

Emilie smiled. “It will certainly matter when your regiment is aiming its cannons at the enemy—and more so when they are aiming theirs at you!” They both laughed, but Emilie quickly grew serious again.

“It matters, because the Creator examined all the ways things could possibly be before settling on the way that worked most harmoniously. ‘I’ll have gravity be just this strong and no stronger,’ he said, and ‘I’ll make objects able to travel this fast and no faster.’ Once he set it all in motion, everything followed, not just here, but everywhere in the universe. If gravity were different on another planet, the calculus for this arc would still hold.”

She retraced with her finger what she had drawn. “The symmetry is beautiful, isn’t it?” she asked, giving her son’s hair a gentle tug. “Science is really the purest form of beauty, Florent-Louis. Through study, we can come to see God’s hand, and I for one want to do that.”

It was difficult having chosen to educate Florent-Louis herself, but his latest tutor, Monsieur Linant, had been so incompetent and self-serving that she had been forced to fire him, and she was not going to get another if he would waste the child’s time with the same indefensible prattle. She had wanted to slap Linant when she overheard him tell Florent-Louis that some things in God’s creation were better left as mysteries, as a sign of respect. Nonsense! God wanted to be known. That was why he had ordained the human mind.

“So what we observe with your ball,” she went on, “is the effect of these laws. The force of gravity is exactly what it is, so the velocity with which you threw the ball made it go as high as it did and no higher, and that caused the ball’s path to be shaped precisely as it was, because no other path was possible.”

“God made it all happen,” Florent-Louis said with a solemn nod.

“Yes, mon chéri, but not in the way many people think. He did it through math. Through physics. When God said, ‘Let there be light,’ he meant let there be a source of energy to warm and illuminate the world, and let it be neither too far away nor too close, and let the earth circle around it, and let the movements of the sun and earth create day and night, and the seasons of the year.”

She looked up through the branches of the tree. “There’s a bird’s nest up there. If you follow one thing to another, you see how the birds and the nest came to be only because God said ‘Let there be
light.’ God is the Great Mathematician and if you want to find him, look in the arc of a thrown ball. Look anywhere in his universe. Look particularly hard at things you don’t understand, for that’s where he hides, waiting for us to come looking for him.”

She could see his attention was waning. “I brought something for you,” she said, producing a glass vial and a long, thin tube open at both ends.

“What is it?”

Emilie pulled out the stopper in the vial and dipped one end of the tube into it. Holding the other end to her lips, she blew out an iridescent sphere that went wobbling off into the air before it burst.

Florent-Louis’s eyes grew wide. “How did you do that?”

She laughed. “It’s just one of the properties of soap. Would you like to try?” Florent-Louis took the tube and the vial. “See how the light doesn’t have visible colors either inside the bubble or outside but only on its surface?” she asked. “It breaks apart there, and then comes back together inside.”

Florent-Louis was blowing one bubble after another, half listening. Emilie smiled. “Run along,” she said, watching him dance across the grass, sending skyward one bubble after another, as she walked back to the house.

What was God’s plan? That was what she cared about. She didn’t want to look only at the products of it. She wanted to see his hand move, wanted to hear what words he spoke to make a universe that functioned as one whole. Could it be reduced to two or three great principles working together, or perhaps even a single one from which everything derived? In the book she had started while waiting for the results of the Academy competition, she would do her best to show the foundations of God’s world, as she understood them. She’d work on what she had decided to call “The Institutes of Physics” until the book was good enough to be published, good enough to be her message to the world.