In tribute to the Voltaire I so admire, and to the brilliance of his thought, I envisioned a scene: a woman, clothed in a richly embroidered oriental dress, stands in the tender light of early morning. Wisps of incense drift softly through the air, blurring the line between dream and waking. In her hands, she lifts a translucent silk robe, pausing just before she slips it over her shoulders. At that quiet moment, her gaze meets her reflection—eyes distant, absorbed, as though seeing something far beyond the surface of the glass.

Her hair is unadorned; no ornament rests upon her head. In this simplicity lies intention—nothing to veil or distract, only a quiet presence untouched by excess. She stands as a delicate symbol of the imagined “Oriental mystery,” so beloved by Enlightenment thinkers. This fascination with the East, so prevalent in the age, was shaped in no small part by the poetic idealism of Voltaire and others who saw in China a model of refined civilisation.

The mirror in the scene is not merely an object—it is a metaphor, a lens through which Enlightenment Europe gazed at the Other. The woman’s reflection becomes more than a likeness; it embodies the West’s mirrored contemplation of the East: at once a tool for self-awareness, and a screen onto which desires and ideals were projected. Voltaire’s vision of China was never simply descriptive; it was a construction, an idealised counterpart fashioned to critique and elevate his own society.

The woman’s act of dressing, then, carries a quiet symbolism. She cloaks herself in the fabrics of the East, just as Enlightenment Europe cloaked itself in imagined Eastern virtues—borrowing beauty to reflect back a more refined image of itself. Her gaze into the mirror is not idle; it is contemplative, filled with the questions of identity and culture. Just as Voltaire looked toward his version of China—not to truly know it, but to rediscover Europe through its imagined reflection—so too does she search the mirror, seeking not the foreign, but herself, refracted through another world.

The complete story and reflections are included in my book, Brushstrokes and Heart.

                                                                                                        —— A.G