Finding Emilie Read Online Free PDF

strand of hair. Emilie reached up to tighten the pins on a dark lock drooping at her neck, but it would be too late to avoid a tongue-lashing tomorrow. “I’m sorry, madame. I was reading and I neglected to prepare myself for dinner.”
    Gabrielle-Anne Froullay du Châtelet would not be so ungracious as to frown in the presence of guests at table, but her ten-year-old daughter felt her hard stare piercing through the candlelight. A servant placed a small piece of confit and several bits of pickled vegetable on Emilie’s plate. The others were finishing their first course, and the guest had resumed his conversation with Emilie’s father, Louis-Nicholas. “Space is so vast,” Bernard de Fontenelle was saying, “that the white band you see across the sky is actually millions upon millions of stars, some of them as big as our sun.” He turned to Emilie with a patronizing lift of his eyebrows. “Did you know that?”
    Emilie nodded. “It’s in a book Father and I are reading.” She put down her fork. “Do you think it’s really possible that thousands of stars have planets orbiting around them? If that’s so with our sun, wouldn’t natural law require that it also be the case anywhere similar conditions exist in the universe?” Her hand brushed against the fork poised on her plate and it clattered onto the table, depositing a small brown morsel she absentmindedly put back onto her plate with herfingers. Emilie cast a sidelong glance at her mother and saw, to her dismay, that she had noticed.
    A smile played at the edge of Fontenelle’s mouth. His friend Louis-Nicholas had told him Emilie was a very bright girl who acquired knowledge as easily as iron shavings flew toward a magnet. But Louis-Nicholas’s young daughter had obviously done more than pack facts in her head. She was asking questions—and precisely the right ones.
    “Yes, I’m sure that is the case,” he went on. “Monsieur Newton has made a convincing argument for his law of attraction, and I think his work shows there is no end to what we might know if we set our minds to study as devotedly as he did. I, for one, believe we are not far off from the day when we will be able to determine mathematically what distant planets are composed of, and even how much they weigh.”
    Gabrielle-Anne rang for the dishes to be cleared for the second course. “My daughter’s mind could be better used pondering other matters,” she said. “I really must insist that the subject be changed.”
    Emilie’s face brightened. Surely another of her favorite subjects would be different enough. “Do you think, Monsieur Fontenelle, that it is possible God sprinkled creations all over the universe?”
    This conversation had gone in the most horrifying and sordid of directions. Gabrielle-Anne glared at her husband. If he hadn’t insisted otherwise because he enjoyed having Emilie to talk to, they would long ago have sent her to a convent to get such foolishness out of her head. What future husband would put up with this? Just look at the girl and Monsieur Fontenelle, acting as if no one else were at the table! This wasn’t precociousness; it was impertinence, and it would have to stop.

1760
    T HE ONLY good thing about the abbey, Lili thought, was that it protected her from Baronne Lomont. Whenever Lili was at Hôtel Bercy for more than a few days, a sedan chair inevitably arrived to take her to Île Saint-Louis, for a visit at Hôtel Lomont. One fall morning shortly after Lili’s eleventh birthday, she presented herself at the baroness’s town house to make her way through the thicket of expectations attached to a simple breakfast.
    “Tell me, Stanislas-Adélaïde, what did you study in catechism this week?” Seated across from Lili, Baronne Lomont set her bony chin slightly forward as if it might enable her to snap heretical thoughts out of the air before they reached the ear of God.
    The baroness broke off a small piece of bread and placed it in her mouth with