Voltaire in Love
Authors: Nancy Mitford
NANCY MITFORD
(1904â1973) 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)âall 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
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, 1904â1973.
Voltaire in love / by Nancy Mitford; introduction by Adam Gopnik.
   p. cm. â (New York Review books classics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59017-578-1(alk. paper)
1. Voltaire, 1694â1778âRelations with women. 2. Du Châtelet, Gabrielle
Ãmilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise, 1706-1749.3. Authors, Frenchâ
18th centuryâBiography. 4. ScientistsâFranceâBiography. 5. Mistressesâ
FranceâBiography. I. Title.
PQ2103.D7M52012
848'.5O9âdc23
[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
Copyright and More Information
7. âLes Amours Philosophiques'
8. Frederick Appears on the Scene
9. Exit Linant, Enter Mme Denis
10. The Battle of Desfontaines
13. Frederick Comes to the Throne
14. Voltaire Fails for the Académie Française
18. The Philosophers in Bad Odour
23. âC'est vous qui me l'avez tuée'
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 Ãmilie, 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 Ãmilie 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 otherâa 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 Taylorâall 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 overabundantâtopiary 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: âIf 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 rageâand even goes to lawâwhen 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 understoodâpartly by instinct, partly by firsthand experience of a Faubourg Saint-Germain social life that had not really changed all that much since the eighteenth centuryâthat 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 Ãmilie 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 Ãmilie 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).
