Émilie du Châtelet in love
This is the second half of the speech I gave to the prestigious Club in Sydney, to introduce the opera composed by Nicholas Gentile and for which I wrote the story and libretto. The singer who played Émilie in our concept film is the wonderful Julie Lea Goodwin, a star of Opera Australia. We loved her as Émilie and we are grateful to Sir Nicholas Hytner, in my view the world's greatest opera director, for his praise of our cinematic opera, for which we are still seeking an Executive Director.
AND so we come to Cirey, Émilie’s country château, still a lovely place to visit if you’re in the Upper Marne region. It’s the late 1730s, the dawn of the Enlightenment. Émilie has so far managed to keep Voltaire out of prison and away from Paris. She has persuaded her husband to protect Voltaire by getting the government and the Catholic Church’s moral watchdog, the Officialité, to let him stay at Cirey as a permanent guest. Émilie’s son is tutored at Cirey while her daughter is at a local convent school. Both Émilie and Voltaire work every day at their own research and writing, they are deep into experimental science and they correspond with the best minds in Europe.
We’re looking here at one of the great love affairs of history. Émilie would seem to have everything: her soul mate, paradise on earth, wealth, a secure marriage, motherhood—and the freedom to tread her own intellectual path. But the haven of Cirey is actually very fragile, and this extraordinary woman runs extraordinary risks.
In France in her time, adultery is a punishable crime—but only the female can be charged and convicted! If things go too far and the Marquis du Châtelet ever decides that Émilie is disgracing his noble name, he has the legal right to repudiate her, strip her of the means of existence, banish her (to a convent, if he’s generous), and never allow her to see her children again. It would only take one love poem of Voltaire’s to be leaked to a newspaper, naming Émilie, and the damage might be done. Further danger lies of course in Voltaire’s philosophical works. If he’s thrown into prison or exile, or tempted away to an intellectual court such as that of Prince Frederick of Prussia, or lured to Paris by the Comédie Française, or to Holland to print the books that are banned in France, her beautiful world of love and learning will collapse.
So Émilie remains at Cirey and, typically, she’s just created another risk for herself. To live an authentic life in the man’s world of science, she must be published. So she’s taken a drastic step, and entered an essay competition run by the Academy of Sciences. Without telling Voltaire. Our opera opens on the morning when the results of the competition come in—brought, as it happens, by Émilie’s former mathematics tutor, Pierre-Louis de Maupertuis. Émilie is thrilled by his arrival at Cirey—Voltaire less so, for reasons that you will easily understand when you see the opera one day.
That was how my speech ended. As it happens, the drama of Émilie's entry into the Academy of Sciences competition gives an extra twist to the plot of Murder in the Basilica, the fifth novel in my Victor Constant Investigations series. I can't reveal any more than that, however, because I'm still writing it!
To access the Victor Constant Investigations, click the Amazon button at the foot of this page. To see videos about Émilie & Voltaire the opera, click the YouTube button.
