Speaking at the Queens Club

Not long after Nicholas Gentile and I produced the award-winning concept film Émilie & Voltaire, we were invited to speak and dine at the Queens Club, a distinguished women's club founded in Sydney in 1912. As a brief portrait of Émilie in her youth, I include here the first part of my speech to the men and women at the Club that evening in 2021.

Hello, everyone! Nicholas and I are very grateful to be welcomed here tonight and we’re delighted to take you behind the scenes of our opera in progress, Émilie & Voltaire. The opera shows us one day in the life of a real person, Émilie du Châtelet. Émilie’s is a woman’s story that every woman should know, so I’d like to begin by introducing her to you as a young girl. I invite you back in time, to 1714, when we find ourselves south of the Loire valley in France, at a country chateau called Preuilly.

It’s evening and dusk is falling, and we’re in a salon that has something of the comfortable atmosphere of this one, though the chairs and sofas are not as well cushioned, and instead of looking out over Hyde Park we can see the little river Claise, gleaming through trees. The viscount and viscountess de Breteuil, whose country home this is, have gathered their guests together after a lovely summer day, to meet the Breteuils’ eight-year-old daughter, brought downstairs as a special treat to mingle with the company before supper.

She walks around and answers questions politely, and at a kind lady’s prompting she plays a piece on the harpsichord. Gabrielle-Émilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil is a dark-haired, tallish, dark-eyed child, who is receiving a very thorough education. Her father is proud of her cleverness and he’s hired tutors for her in mathematics and natural philosophy (or science as we know it) alongside the usual Latin and literature. Her mother, however, insists on music and dancing lessons but disapproves of all the rest. Émilie’s father shamelessly shows off her talents, and to everyone’s astonishment she multiplies six-figure numbers together in her head and joins in discussions on the scientific authors of the day.

In a corner is a tall, lean young man who looks rather bemused by this precocious eight-year-old. Finally he steps forward when the company are speculating about the possibility of life on other planets. He gives Émilie a teasing smile and says, ‘Mademoiselle, could there be human beings on Mercury? Reflect: if they do live there, they’re twice as close to the sun as we are, so their brains must surely be fried. The sun is nine times bigger for them than it is for us—what does that do to their idea of the universe? Could anyone in that situation think like us at all?’

She replies, ‘I have no opinion, monsieur; I’m here on earth. But if there are sentient creatures on Mercury, why should they be human? All we can guess is that they accord with the infinite diversity of nature.’

The silenced young man is Voltaire, a successful dramatist and poet, a keen philosopher and writer, and a huge asset in aristocratic society. He’s not an aristocrat himself, however. He was born François-Marie Arouet in Paris, near the law courts and Notre-Dame. He was educated at an excellent Jesuit college where he mixed with the sons of noblemen, dazzled his teachers with his intellect and wit, and wrote the school play at the end of each year. When he went into society he fitted in by making up a noble name for himself—‘de Voltaire’—and forming liaisons with actresses or duchesses, and no one in between.

NOW let’s jump to 1733, to the royal opera house in Paris. It’s the first night of The Empire of Love and Voltaire has come along to applaud the librettist, Moncrif, who’s a friend of his. Émilie has come because she’s very fond of opera and goes at least once a week with one of her three best friends, who are all duchesses. When Voltaire and Émilie fall into conversation on that fateful night, Voltaire claims that he’s met her before, through her late father, the receiver of the ambassadors at the court of Versailles, but Émilie denies ever having met Voltaire. Why is this? Possibly the social distance between them.

A lot has happened over the last nineteen years. Émilie is married, to a gentleman of higher rank than her own, with no great wealth but considerable land, and she has been the Marquise du Châtelet since the age of nineteen, with privileges at Versailles, where she plays cards with the queen. The Marquis du Châtelet is the head of one of the great families of the Lorraine and his family heritage is with the army: he is colonel of an infantry regiment in the Rhineland. The marquis is kind and considerate, and although his own pursuits are utterly different from Émilie’s, he respects her learning and her determination to make progress in physics. She has repaid him impeccably by giving him children and comporting herself as befits their high station: that is, with dignity and discretion.

What has Voltaire been doing over the last nineteen years? Well, he’s a best-selling playwright, he’s made a vast fortune in various kinds of business, almost all the philosophical books he’s published have been declared illegal, he’s been thrown into prison more than once, and the government’s only just let him come back from three years’ exile in England. He’s arguably the funniest and most entertaining man in France, and altogether a dangerous person to know.

But from the moment they start talking to each other, the love affair is inevitable. The beautiful Émilie is both passionate and impulsive, and Voltaire equals her in energy and eloquence. He is very generous: amongst his gifts to her—along with all the diamonds and sapphires and scientific instruments—are expensive lessons in mathematics from the famous geometer, Pierre-Louis de Maupertuis, who becomes a close friend.

From the moment they begin the love affair, disaster is inevitable. Except for hearts and minds, this is a mismatch of incendiary proportions. Amongst the top echelons in the French monarchy, people are supposed to conduct liaisons at their own level and in strict secrecy—but Voltaire is bourgeois, and infamous, and his every move gives rise to scandal. Lovers are never supposed to be seen together in public, but in 1734 Émilie and Voltaire both appear at the wedding of a close friend, the Duc de Richelieu. The celebration is far off in Burgundy and Émilie has her husband’s permission to attend—nonetheless, it ends in tears. Another friend in Paris sends them a warning: there is a warrant out for Voltaire’s arrest over a banned book, and the king has dispatched gendarmes to Burgundy to throw him in prison once again.

Voltaire is frantic to get across the border to Switzerland or the Lorraine but Émilie is terrified she’ll never see him again. She persuades him to go to a Châtelet property in the Champagne province, and hide there incognito while she goes back to Paris and Versailles to beg for his freedom.

For more about the film, here's a link to our Pitch to Camera. For further videos you can also click on the YouTube button at the foot of this page. Use the Amazon button to go straight to my crime novel, Murder at Cirey.