Finding Emilie (55 page)
“Well, what do they think is?”
“I’m supposed to sit around all day and talk to people about things that don’t matter. If anything’s too complicated for my father, he outlaws it, so it means that anything worth talking about has been forbidden.”
“Why does he do that?”
“Because he thinks people are plotting against him. He thinks if people use a word he doesn’t know, they’re sending a secret message. Just before he locked me up, some people were
talking about Newton. When they told him Newton had lived very far away and he had been dead a long time, he said, ‘Well then, why do you disturb my sleep with talk of him?’ and threw them all in a dungeon.”
“Did he know who Newton was?”
“He thought he did. He said Newton was from China and he had swept eastward and conquered us a long time ago. I told him I thought he meant Attila the Hun, but he said that since the two names sounded so much alike, they must be related.”
“So how did you end up here?”
“I love to spin. Maybe it’s because you can see the connection between what goes in and what comes out. Don’t you think that’s rather reassuring?”
Meadowlark nodded. “And rare.”
“And the best part is that I matter,” the princess added. “What I do to the wool is what makes it come out the way it does. But the problem is that I’m supposed to let the servants do it. It’s beneath me, my parents say. First they locked me up here with nothing to spin, and then when that didn’t work they gave me everything I needed and told me to keep spinning until I was so sick of it I would beg them to let me stop.” She pushed the tangles of thread out of the way. “The room’s full to the ceiling again, and they’d better come cart it away soon, or they’ll find me dead of suffocation.”
She leaned out even further. “Can you help me?”
“What do you want me to do?”
The princess pulled a letter from her bodice and let it float to the ground. “Can you deliver this? It’s to someone I love, but I was afraid to tell him when I could, for fear it would become complicated, and that always ends up badly.” She shrugged. “My father—I guess I’m a little like him after all.”
Meadowlark took the letter. “Where can I find this person?” she asked.
“That’s the hard part,” the princess said. “I hope it’s not too late. He’s in the dungeon. He’s the one who mentioned Newton.”
In which Meadowlark and Tom go to the Brazilian Rain Forest and learn about happiness …
D
eep in the Brazilian rain forest, Meadowlark and Tom dangled their feet in the waters of the Amazon, just outside the walls of a fabled city of gold. From every direction, people appeared from the jungle, waving palm fronds and singing chants as they made their way toward the city gate.
“What’s that on their right cheeks?” Tom asked. Meadow-lark squinted in the bright sun. “I don’t know,” she said. “It looks like a birthmark in the shape of Corsica.” She scanned the crowd. “And they all have the identical one.”
“There’s no such thing as identical birthmarks,” Tom said. “That’s the point of having them, isn’t it?”
Meadowlark nodded. “You there,” she called out to a young girl at the edge of the crowd. “Where are you going with those red stains on your faces?”
The girl looked bewildered. “We paint them on every morning. It takes a long time too, since they have to be perfect.” Seeing Meadowlark’s confusion, she went on. “It’s the king’s birthmark. We try to look as much like the king as we
can to show our respect and appreciation. He always has our best interests at heart, you know.”
Her eyes darted around and when she was sure no one could hear, she bade Meadowlark to come closer. “But it can’t be permanent, because the next king will have our best interests at heart too, and we’ll all have to change to look like him.”
“How do you know he has your best interests at heart?” Tom asked.
“Because he says so,” the girl replied. “And because we are happier here than people anywhere else on Earth. Doesn’t that prove it?”
“Who says you’re happier?” Meadowlark inquired.
“The king does!” The girl threw her hands up in exasperation. “Really, what is wrong with you? Are people where you come from happier than we are?”
“I don’t know,” Meadowlark said. “I’ll have to look around next time I’m in France.”
“We don’t have to look around,” the girl said proudly. “We already know. But you’ve come on the perfect day if you need convincing. This is the Festival of the Four Returning Wanderers. Every year the king sends young men out in each of the four directions, and today is the day they give their report on whether they found happier people anywhere.” Her face clouded. “Only this year we’ve been told only three returned. It’s dangerous out in the world, you know—and that makes us appreciate being here all the more.”
“Maybe he didn’t come back because he found a happier place and decided to stay,” Meadowlark said.
The girl’s eyes darted around to see if anyone might have heard. “You can be put to death for saying something like that! It causes discontent, and that ruins everything.”
“Look at those men!” Tom said, tugging on Meadowlark’s sleeve. She turned around just in time to catch a glimpse of a small group, all with crooked noses and flattened cheeks. “What happened to their faces?” she asked.
“The king fell out of a tree once and landed on his face,” the girl said. “He had two terrible black eyes and a broken nose. Most of us just irritated our eyes with sand to make them as bloodshot as his, and ringed them with soot until his bruises were gone, but they wanted to show how much more devoted they were, so they bashed their faces in with boards.”
The girl gave a furtive glance around. “The king healed quite nicely. Most people think those men were quite foolish to do that, since they don’t look like him at all anymore, but we admire them greatly all the same. See the medals around their necks? They’re Knights of the Royal Order of Self-Bashers. The king established it to honor them for their devotion.”
By now Meadowlark and Tom had arrived in a large public square. A dais had been erected in the middle, upon which the king and queen sat under brightly colored umbrellas. Since it was a hot day, young girls and boys waved fans made of parrot feathers over their royal heads and mopped their royal faces with the soft undersides of gigantic jungle leaves.
Three young men climbed the steps and stood in front of the royal couple. The girl pointed to another man on the stage. “He’s the Official Bellower,” she said. “He’ll repeat whatever the travelers tell the king.”
“He said, ‘I have searched far and wide and found nothing but misery and unhappiness,’” the Bellower called out after the First Wanderer was finished. The crowd burst into loud cheers. The Second Wanderer stepped forward and after he had spoken with the king, the crowd hushed, waiting to hear. “He has searched far and wide and found nothing but misery
and unhappiness,” the Bellower called out to another burst of applause.
“Hooray for the misery of others,” a few sang out, and the crowd joined in with what must have been a familiar song.
The happiest are best, the best are happiest.
Praise to the Returning Wanderers!
They make this truth shine clear.
The happiest are best, the best are happiest.
Hooray for the misery of others!
They make this truth shine clear.
Meadowlark was standing near the dais, and when it was the Third Wanderer’s turn, he stood at a different angle and she could see the words he formed with his lips. “Your Majesty, everywhere I went I found that some people were happy enough, while others did nothing but complain,” he said. “I believe that people are as contented here as anywhere, and as happy as possible, short of heaven.”
“He said, ‘I have searched far and wide and found nothing but misery and unhappiness,’” the Bellower shouted to the crowd.
“What?” Meadowlark’s jaw dropped as she turned to Tom.
“Shh!” The girl glared at her. “Isn’t anything sacred where you come from?” she said, turning to join in the song.
Meadowlark and Tom found Comète in a nearby clearing and jumped on his back. As he flew over the mighty Amazon, Meadowlark pulled back on the reins. “Who’s that?” she asked Tom, pointing down toward a young man paddling a boat. She guided Comète to a landing on the sandy shore. “Are you the Fourth Wanderer?” she asked.
“I am,” the young man nodded with a wide grin.
“Did you find a place where people were happier?” Tom broke in.
“No,” the Fourth Wanderer said. “Things are pretty much the same everywhere. But I’ve discovered I’m happier out here on the river, with no one telling me what to do or think.” He touched the place on his cheek where the red stain once had been. “And I’ve decided I’m never going back.”
He looked at the two of them. “Do you think that’s wrong? Maybe I could convince people that bashing in their faces or painting birthmarks on their cheeks has nothing to do with happiness after all.”
“No,” Meadowlark said. “Things like that are too good a substitute for real happiness for most people to be willing to give up.”
The young man’s lip trembled and Meadowlark thought for a moment that he might burst into tears. “You don’t think they would want to know that they’re not really the best or the happiest? That they’d be better off deciding for themselves who they are and what they want?”
“I’ve wandered the world a little myself,” Meadowlark said gravely. “And I can tell you something you will probably find wherever you go.”
“What’s that?” the young man asked.
“It’s easier to bash in one’s skull than to think with the mind inside it.”
H
ISTORICAL NOVELISTS
strive to make a time and place more real by weaving the factual and the imagined together. We start out knowing what we are inventing and what we are taking from our sources, but the end product becomes so complex that the boundaries are blurred. Lili and Delphine are more real to me than the characters who actually lived, since I spent so much more time with them, and the most “real” things about the biographical characters are the details and dialogues I invented.
The fabric of the story can be teased apart quite easily, however, to answer the question, “What happened next?” For my fictional characters, the best response is that the reader’s imagination is as good as mine. Lili and my other creations are dear friends of a season whom I have now lost track of and know nothing further about. The real-life characters, however, are another matter.
The epilogue is set in 1778, the year the French openly allied themselves with the American colonies in the war for independence from Britain, and the year in which both of Lili’s mentors, Buffon and Voltaire, died. Eleven years later, the French Revolution would sweep away Lili and Delphine’s world almost as quickly as the soap bubbles bursting over the lawn at Étoges. If the novel had continued, Lili and Delphine would have been forty when the revolution broke out, and their daughters would have been young wives starting families of their own.
Their future, like that of all those of their class, would not have been pretty. Their husbands would have been particularly vulnerable,
for even socially conscious noblemen supportive of the revolution’s goals lost their heads to the guillotine. Emilie du Châtelet’s only surviving son, Florent-Louis, was guillotined during the Reign of Terror. One prominent scientist, Antoine Lavoisier, on whom Jean-Étienne is loosely modeled, had his pioneering work on the conservation of mass and the role of oxygen in combustion cut short by the executioner’s blade. When Lavoisier asked the judge at his trial if his execution could be stayed long enough for him to complete some scientific work, the judge told him, “The Republic has no need of scientists.”
Like Lavoisier, Jean-Étienne might have finished his time in this world as a headless corpse thrown into a common grave. Lavoisier’s wife, Marie, was his chief assistant, and Lili’s desire to be of service to science in Jean-Étienne’s lab might have come to the same abrupt end as Marie’s did when her husband died. Though Marie lived into her seventies, many women also ended their lives on the guillotine, so Lili’s fate could have been worse than widowhood.