History Doesn't Repeat...: 2013

Passionate Minds

David Bodanis

2006

Emilie du Châtelet

Émilie du Châtelet, wrote Voltaire, "was a great man whose only fault was being a woman."

She led [Voltaire] through Newton's great works, and that became the great shift in Voltaire's career, as he started seriously exploring with her how the clear rational laws that Newton had discovered for outer space could apply to improve human institutions here on Earth as well. [3]

…

The belief in the superiority of the rich over the poor was staggering. In France, if the King had chosen to give you a noble title, you often didn't have to pay basic tax -- at all. So long as an aristocrat didn't lose that title of nobility, that his children could usually -- and quite legally -- be exempted from having to pay those taxes either. Were they are children, or their children either. There were thousands of wealthy families in France that had paid virtually no tax for centuries. Only the little people did. Working for pay was demeaning, and indeed almost the only way for a noble to lose these tax exemptions was to be seen in gauging in the scorned activity of paid work. [4]

It was also taken for granted that the government could probe what individuals believed. Censorship was omnipresent, and if what someone believed was deemed wrong, then the government could punish that person as harshly as it wished. There was no space for private religious beliefs. [4]

These ideas entered deep into the roots of the American Revolution and Constitution. It's especially poignant today, for these Enlightenment ideas are at the heart of what is hated by groups such as Al Qaeda: the belief that diverse religions should be equally respected; that women can be treated fairly; that church and state can be separated; that old beliefs are not the sole path to truth.

Voltaire was devastated [by her sudden death in her early 40s] ("I have lost the greatest part of myself"), and if there is a bitterness, an angry bite to his satires after that, it's largely due to this awful injustice at the end. [6] It's especially strong in Candide, the satirical philosophical story he wrote a decade later, built on themes the two of them had spent innumerable hours arguing over [7]

Since her main work was so technical, the women who ran Paris's salons had no way of understanding its importance.... by the end of the 18th century Immanuel Kant was writing that to imagine Madame du Châtelet a great thinker was as preposterous as imagining a woman to possess a beard; by the Victorian era of the 19th century, all but the briefest references to her name were gone. [7]

Voltaire's biographers also often downplayed the role of science in shaping his life, which inevitably meant downplaying du Châtelet as well. [9]

Emilie's elderly father, Louis-Nicholas, looked on thoughtfully. He had arranged this evening, for he recognized that his daughter was different from other children, badgering him with constant questions about history and the court and the stars and religion. [20]

Her father was unusual. Most European thinkers of the time were convinced that human adults were actually two different species, with males having been created with superior intellects to match their superior strength. [22]

"men can choose lots of ways to achieve glory," Emilie wrote, looking back, "... but women cannot. Yet when someone is born with a soul that wants more, at least solitary study is there to console them."... even the most distinguished girls school, located outside Paris, had no significant studies, and allowed only a single 30 minute visit with parents every three months. Punishment at elite conference schools included sending young girls, repeatedly and alone, to pray in stifling dark burial vaults. (One of Louis XV's daughters suffered such fits of terror from being forced to do this but she never recovered.) [22]

In medieval times, several hundred years earlier, there have been virtually no science. The universe was felt to be very simple. There was God on high, and Kings and the Pope and Cardinals below him, and the chain of authority continued on, down through bishops, and nights, and monks, all the way to the humblest peasant. Everyone was in his place.

Nothing new was to be discovered. Even the heavens above were unchanging. Earth was at the center of a small universe, and the sun and planets orbiting around us not very far away, possibly closer than the moon.... no one could question this, for not only was it obvious to direct sites, but the King and the church derived their authority from the very nature of this unchanging universe. God ruled from a celestial throne, just as our superiors ruled us from their earthly thrones. Questioning the truth of astronomy would be the same as questioning the authority of kings and religious leaders here on earth. It was a strict theocracy in which Emilie's distant ancestors lived. [25]

Emilie was bright enough of mathematics to teach herself analytic geometry. Shouldn't she be able to count cards at the gaming tables quickly enough to give her a chance to win in gambling? (Gambling was popular, and well bred young women were often exposed to it enough to pick up the rudiments.) If she did develop that skill, then with the money she might gain...

"My daughter is mad," Louis-Nicholas soon wrote. "Last week she won more than 2,000 gold louis at the card tables, and... spent... half on new books... I argued with her in vain, that she would not understand that no great lord will marry a woman who is seen reading every day." [26]

Girls could be legally married at 12, and engaged -- with no chance of recourse -- at age 7.

Legal courts were so weak at the time, and judges so easily swayed by bribes or political influence, that without such personal connections it is quite possible for a family's inheritance to be greatly diminished. [26]

One aristocrat, for example, had signed the marriage contract with the 12-year-old daughter of a wealthy man and then left his new wife in a convent -- she'd been sent back there after the wedding night -- where she learned how to read and to sing while he proceeded to spend the dowry on his gambling debts. [27]

The new court that have been built at Versailles was a mark of weakness, stemming from those fearful days: the isolated palace there was more easily defensible against assassins, and several hours ride from mass assaults in Paris.

For a while the successes in the middle years of Louis XIV's long reign had largely concealed that weakness. In the late 1600s France had dominated the Western world: it had the greatest army, the greatest economy, greatest architects and engineers and thinkers. But from the latter years of the 1600s, in a decay accelerated by the old Louis's vicious attack on all French Protestants, forcing his country's greatest entrepreneurs to leave, the country's apparent success masked a steady decline. Wars were lost, and the frontiers drew closer: the theater and poetry became stilted. And these failures meant that at the end of Louis XIV's reign there were increasing doubts about the near magical authority that the Crown had insisted came from God. [30]

[Voltaire's 1718 play Oedipus] expressed with efficiency the views of the aristocrats and upper professional classes in the audience, who were united in finding most of the church's guidance laughable. The Reformation had been beaten back so completely in France that this church had become astoundingly corrupt. Rich youngsters could be created bishops simply because their families bought the position for them. The youngsters so elevated rarely had a religious conviction to match their holy ascendance, and instead use their position almost entirely to accumulate mistresses and wealth. [36]

the top lawyers and physicians among them, for example, recognize that aristocrats were the pinnacle of society, and they hated the fact that they were looked down upon for failing to have clawed their way up there. The snub was made worse because of the law regulating how an aristocrat could lose his title. Lack of education, lunacy, or profound alcoholism would have no effect at all. But if an aristocrat engaged in the indignity of actually working for a living, then he could be dropped from the nobility (and his family would lose their exemption from tax).

The aristocrats in the audience, for their part, invariably hated the rising professionals. They were ever more of these narrow creatures, who showed a distressing skill at acquiring wealth in business and law, despite the tax disadvantage they suffered from actually working. [36]

They were part of a world that had existed stably for untold centuries, where there was a loyal elite on top of society, peasants at the bottom, and a strict class system safely holding all the parts in between together. [37]

Voltaire even got his father to attend one performance, and -- perhaps despite himself -- the old man was seen applauding madly. [37]

Actresses were usually considered little more than conveniently displayed prostitutes ("it was routine to offer a performance in bed, after a performance in the theater ") [38]

His long poem on Henry IV was finished, or at least an early version was. Since it lauded that King, but encouraged religious minorities, by implication it was critical of Louis XIV, who believed in persecuting non-Catholics. (If a suspected Protestant tried not to swallow a wafer being stuffed in his mouth the Communion, the penalty -- which came in church supported -- could be dragged out of the church and burned alive.) [39]

to stern lawyers such as Voltaire's father it was a waste of a life. [39]

Voltaire once wrote that "in this world one is reduced to being either hammer or anvil." [39]

[Voltaire may have continued in this life of partying with aristocrats] but one evening in January 1725, when Voltaire had just turned 31 and was at the opera with his friends around him, an arrogant aristocrat whom he'd known vaguely from Sully's circles came up to join them. Auguste de Rohan-Chabot, who was always slower than Voltaire in conversation and must have recognized how much he was showed up at those long picnics or dinners... called out words to the effect of awe, there you are, Monsieur Voltaire, or Arouet, or whatever it is you call yourself. It was a slur, a reminder of Voltaire's origins, but trying to win a match of wits with Voltaire was not an intelligent gambit. Voltaire easily replied: Yes, I am the first to honor my name, but what have you done to honor yours? [40]

[Voltaire was later badly beaten by de Rohan's body guards.] But instead of sympathy or even outraged, he found a great cold distance. Sully and his friends had nothing to say. They certainly wouldn't go to the police with him to back up his complaint. A wordsmith and overstep certain bounds and now had simply been put in his place.

Voltaire was dumbfounded. How could his friends do this to him? [All his friends] now all withdrew. Jolly rhymes were one thing -- that's what clever commoners were brought to great country houses for. But no one was going to turn against a fellow aristocrat who had been in danger of being humbled.

Everything he'd assumed was true was falling apart. After one final try at Versailles he gave up on his wealthy friends. Voltaire could take revenge on his own. The sentence for murder was death, but he didn't care.

[He dropped out and] had begun to take up fencing lessons… On the night of April 17 [1725] Voltaire was arrested… In April 1725 he was thrown into the Bastille again, but that was not enough: he was still a danger from the attention he was getting, plus the likelihood he would try to attack de Rohan again if he was let out. After just two weeks he was escorted to the port of Calais. There were ships there to England, or the forests of America, or the deserts of the Sahara. It didn't matter which he got on, but he was being expelled from France. [42]

parents of her class were strongly discouraged from spending much time with their children when very young. They were wet nurses and nannies to handle these "primitive" tasks. [43]

Emilie knew that the great English thinker John Locke two generations before had found a patron in a wealthy aristocrat, and was led through him to interesting intellectual circles in London. The even greater researcher Isaac Newton had been sheltered and encouraged at Cambridge University. Yet no woman in France -- for England -- was allowed to register as a university, let alone to the grand Académie des Sciences in Paris. [44]

the rules of etiquette meant that, as a woman, she could never travel on her own to visit them. [44]

the great majority of French women couldn't sign their name in marriage registers, let alone read anything complex… Louis XV daughters remained illiterate, even after several years in confidence. And Archbishop of a previous generation, who had promised them neatly written that "nothing is more neglected than the education of girls," went on to explain that it was of course a limited education he had in mind, which should concentrate on managing servants.

In the few schools that were available for women, all science, philosophy, and literature were taboo. A small amount of history was sometimes allowed, but only, as one contemporary put it, "in order not to confuse a Roman emperor within Emperor of China... all this must be accomplished without rules or methods, and only so the girls might be no more ignorant than ordinary people." [45]

John Locke's writings managed to give her some consolation, for his work spoke to her isolation, showing what a solitary explorer could find. Locke believed that our mind was a mere blank slate when we were born, a tabula rasa (A. "scraped tablet"). This was revolutionary. If the mind was blank, it became very important to see who had the power to write on that slate. The writing might be pronouncements from the pulpit of an established church; it might be rules teaching us to defer to the royal family. But if something is wrong with how we think, then the fault is not with any preformed ideas we are born with. Rather, it's the institutions leading us to those misleading or dangerous beliefs that will have to change.

Locke's view made sense to Emilie, explaining how women in modern France were taught to simper or become lost in snide gossip.... Locke's philosophy suggested that women didn't have to be indoctrinated that way. Different education, or different attitudes in society, could let us break free from that narrowness....

Popular fiction in the 1600s or very early 1700s, for example, before Emilie came of age, seems odd to our eyes: the plots are amorphous or random, while the heroes or heroines are often led by internal moral or semi-religious quests. But now, when Emilie was a young woman, a new sort of writing -- the novel -- is becoming popular. In 1728, the very year that Emilie returned to Paris with her two toddlers, the Englishman Henry Fielding produced his first play at Drury Lane. It was the start of her career that would peak two decades later in his novel Tom Jones, with his perfectly Lockean hero, so energetically shaped by the sensations and attitudes that society has on offer for him.) [46]

Richelieu was a man's man, yet also one who most women blindly adored. It was through him that she got the confidence crucial for the next stage of her life.

He was the great nephew of the famous cardinal who'd helped establish the centralized French state; the sun king, Louis XIV, himself had been his godfather. He'd inherited a fortune and been thrown into the Bastille three times before his mid-20s -- first at age 15 by his own father for disobedience, then at age 19 for dueling, and finally at 23 for plotting to overthrow the government. [47]

he was always careful to sustain the external forms of Catholic marriage. This meant no holding hands in public and no staying the night at someone else's home while you were in the same city as your spouse. (Having more public affairs away from Paris was less of a difficulty, for one was showing polite discretion by being so far removed.)

The trick was to be able to hold two views at once. The married Louis XIV, for example, would always stop his carriage when he passed a priest, and bow with full sincerity -- even if he was in the carriage because he was heading off for afternoon with one of his innumerable mistresses. All of France worked that way. [48]

Marriage was a matter of financial and social alliance between families, and so long as that was respected, the natural passions that humans felt could be fulfilled without destabilizing the system. (49)

With one's husband, formal sex in the missionary position was all that should be offered, but with a lover, the woman could be more inventive. [49]

Emilie then did another thing no other woman in France is to. Richelieu wasn't the man she was looking for, but she was so graceful during the breakup that the two became lifelong correspondence and friends. In the years to come, he sent her hundreds of letters, sometimes superficial, sometimes thoughtful (and always poorly spelled, even by the relaxed standards of the time).

Voltaire was 31 but still needed to exaggerate and show off. There were no music barges on the river that spring, he had no letters of introduction to local merchants, and if there were foot races at Greenwich, he wouldn't have been able to ask any of the locals about them, for he didn't speak English.

What really happened his first day, or near his first day, was that he trudged up the Highgate, on a hill north of London, where he had arranged for a cash transfer to be waiting. But when he arrived he found that his banker was bankrupt. He had to go all the way back to the grand boulevard of Pall Mall, where Bolingbroke's city mansion stood, a dairy found that "my Lord and my Lady Bolingbrook were in the country." Voltaire was broke, and no doubt sweaty, and knew no one to help them. The Bolingbroke's country house was impossibly far away. As he later admitted to the one friend to whom he was always honest, Nicolas Thieriot, "I was without a penny, sick to death of a violent flu, stranger, alone, helpless, in the midst of the city, wherein I was known to nobody. I could not make bold to see our ambassador in so wretched a condition."

[Voltaire got lucky and ran into an English trader whom he had met earlier in France, Fawkener.] Why couldn't he learn English well enough to become a great author in England instead?... he had one goal -- to learn English perfectly -- and he found the ideal place to do it. [In 3 months, by visiting the theater at Drury Lane, following the plays with a written play, and keeping a journal, he was able to master English.] By October he casually wrote a friend of the following note, in English: "I intend to send you two or three columns of Mr. Pope, the best poet of England, and at present, of all the world. I hope you are acquainted enough with the English tongue, to be sensible of all the charms of his works." He knew very well which poems were considered good, for he began corresponding with Pope, and soon Jonathan Swift, and... almost everyone else who counted in England. [56]

Since he was fluent in English, and the Bolingbroke's -- both Lord and my Lady -- were back from their summer country house, soon he was introduced everywhere in the bizarre country that was England. The distance of under 30 miles across the channel meant a great deal then, for with no regular travel, and of course no television, radio, or magazine pictures, Voltaire had had hardly any clear idea of what to expect.

Personal servants, he found, didn't have to carry letters between individual homes for delivery within a few hours: instead there was a Postal Service, more efficient than anything in France. He also learned that, at least in the wealthiest mansions, servants didn't have to carry water from room to room -- there were miniature pumps and pipes instead, an arrangement that Paris entirely lacked.

He discovered strange, meat-avoiding beings called "vegetarians," who compounded their oddity by going for long brisk walks for their health. He found his way to the Royal Exchange, where there was the greater oddity that "the Jew, Mahometan, and the Christian transact together as though they all profess the same religion … and give the name of Infidel to none but bankrupt." In France that would have been impossible, for non-Catholics were forbidden positions of power, and as seen, until recently when Protestants have been identified -- often by reformers -- they had been tortured or thrown into slavery on galley ships.

Often around London there were fierce military recruiters with bear skin hats and wrapping drums, with the King's authority behind him, but Voltaire also learned that there were some Britons opposed all that. He made his way to the wooded isolation of Hampstead, and discovered even greater radicals, called "Quakers."

"The reason of are not using the outward sword, "Voltaire recorded a leading Quaker, Andrew Pitt, explaining:

is that we are neither wolves, tygers, nor mastiffs, but men and Christians. Our God... would certainly not permit us to cross the seas, merely because murderers close cloath'd in scarlet, and wearing caps two foot high enlist citizens by noise made with too little sticks on an ass's skin extended... When, after a victory is gained and the whole city of London is illuminated; when the sky is in a blaze of fireworks, and the noises heard in the air of thanksgivings, of bells, of organs, and of the cannon, we grown in silence, and are deeply affected with sadness of spirit and brokenness of heart, for the sad havoc which is the occasion of those public rejoicings.

How could this be? In France, no religion that opposed the Kings militarism could survive. But in England there was far more freedom for minority religions in France. [57]

The more he saw of England's pro-business attitude, for example, the more he liked it. "I do not know," he tried composing, "which is the more useful to the state, a well powdered courtier who knows to a moment the hour at which the King rises and which he goes to bed... or a merchant who was enriching his country, who gives from his office orders for [Bombay] and for Cairo, and who contributes to the happiness of the world." Voltaire realized this would be the way to show what else was wrong about the profoundly snobbish country he left behind. [58]

Newton had had the bad grace to die just a bit too soon to be interviewed by Voltaire… in 1727 and especially 1728, his enthusiasm began to fade.

He recognized that he was never going to be able to write like Shakespeare, while in France and received acclaim for writing as well as Racine and Molière. [58]

The court might be ready to discreetly overlook what had happened. Voltaire had been in England long enough. It was time to go home. [58]

"I was not born rich, far from it... [and] I saw so many poor and despised men of letters that I decided... not to add to their numbers... there is always one way or another by which a private individual can profit without incurring an obligation to anyone."

Voltaire had been a student at the Jesuit school Louis le Grand in the hunger year of 1709, and the catastrophic winter saw wolves enter the outskirts of many French cities, and the failure of crops the subsequent summer cause mass starvation. The clerics who ran the school had managed to keep students fed and scrounge enough wood for the stoves through one series of black-market machinations after another. Although Voltaire had not been taught any science or modern history, that example in practical skill from his teachers and others had done wonders in showing him how obstacles could be overcome. [59]

[Voltaire and his mathematician friend La Condamine bought up all the worthless bonds that were in default and participated in a lottery, understanding that each of the bonds was in essence a ticket] He and La Condamine effectively bought every single one of the defaulted bonds. They got very very rich. Voltaire amassed a fortune that -- combined with other shrewd investments -- meant not only did he never have to worry about money, or asked and aristocratic "friend" for financial help, ever again in his life, but he was actually now richer than most aristocrats in France. [60]

Paris still got much of its drinking water from the Seine, into which a city's worth of raw sewage poured. [His actress lover Adrienne Lecouvreur died of typhoid.] When she died she found that she couldn't be buried in any of the cemeteries she would have wished for -- since she was an actress, she was officially excommunicated by the Catholic Church in France. Instead of a respectable burial, where Voltaire and her family could have mourned, her body was dragged away in a cheap municipal carriage and thrown into a shallow grave in an open field outside the city gates. Sizzling lime was poured over her corpse, and that was it; it was unsanctified ground, and no headstone or any other memorial was allowed.

How could this happen? In England in the same year, the great actress Anne Oldfield died, and in the British tradition was granted a richly attended funeral in Westminster Abbey....

He recognized that the reason had to lie in some deep difference between France and England. On the surface the two countries had many similarities: both overseas empires and had suffered civil wars and great religious battles. Yet England respected its artists and thinkers -- Newton had been buried in Westminster Abbey as well -- in a way that France did not. The entire climate of opinion was different. Possibly it was linked to the greater tyrranical power of the French king, and the court's dislike of any competitors; possibly -- in some way Voltaire couldn't get grasp -- it was linked to the more advanced developments in science over in England. But although he wanted to put a section on Newton right at the center of what became known as his Letters from England, the mathematics was too hard for him to advance on his own. [62]

He was investing in the grain business, and also had been overseeing a factory to fabricate paper, and wanted to be near the dock where his barges arrived in the city. It was a life, but not a very interesting one. Yet no one to fight against, but no one to live for either. He was in a rut. [62]

In Emilie's world, only families that had been ennobled for at least 300 years were officially allowed to go hunting with the King. If a family had made its fortune in a business or law, as with Voltaire's father, they had almost no chance of being let into the top levels of government; they or their relatives certainly couldn't be given a commission in the army. It would be is if only Americans who have ancestors who came over before 1776 could be allowed top jobs at the Pentagon or in the White House today, while everyone else, however competent, had to stay put. [68]

[Voltaire] always hated his older brother, a smug Calvinist style rigid Catholic who was a member of the grouping called the Jansenists… "Why be so horrified by our existence?" Voltaire inked in his tight, neat script. "To look at the universe as a prison, and all men as condemned prisoners about to be executed: that's the idea of a fanatic... why despair because we can't see God directly? It would be like despairing for not having four legs and two wings... we can [simply] be... as happy as human nature allows."

We take this for granted today, but it was radical at its time. For centuries the Church had taught that fallen mankind had no right to be happy: this was not our role on Earth. Our purpose was to suffer, as the Savior had suffered for us. The aristocratic elite also would have laughed at the idea that mere ordinary people should aim to be happy. Ordinary people were, quite obviously, placed on Earth to work. Let the majority of people aim for their own happiness, and the system could collapse. [69]

But the de Guise ancestors who had cheated, stolen, murdered, and prostituted themselves to acquire their great wealth had possessed the grace to do this many, many centuries before, which meant that their actions were obscured by a gentle mist of history. [75]

Letters from England... implicitly mocked France by repeatedly praising how things were done across the Channel. When Voltaire had described the Royal Exchange, for example, where investors were tolerant of each other's religions, since they only cared about successful business opportunities, it was a dig at France, where the King and Church insisted that there was to be no toleration of individuals of a different religion, however harmful to the nation's industry or commerce. [77]

In particular, in those writings against Pascal, Voltaire had proposed that we could achieve this happiness largely on our own, rather than needing the official clergy to help avert or diminish the sour damnation that Pascal's God would have wished on us. That undermined the huge establishment of the church, and even Voltaire recognize that publicizing such words within France was much too dangerous even to try. The author of such heresy could be sent to the Bastille, or worse. [78]

[Voltaire was arrested by soldiers while he was searching for Richelieu and could have been hanged for espionage except that the commander he was taken to] was the son of the Prince who'd written an ode for Voltaire after the triumph of his Oedipus. His father had constantly lauded the great writer, so instead of the gallows, Voltaire was invited to a feast. [82]

Prisoners [of the Bastille] were still subject to arbitrary torture, and the King oversaw a legal system that allowed certain offenders to be burned alive. Now, on June 10, the city's parliament formally condemned Voltaire's Letter from England, for the books heretical views mocking the one true path to religious salvation. The same day, at 11 AM, the public executioner stood before the grand stairwell of the Palace of Justice on the Isle of the city in the center of Paris. (It was in that very complex of buildings that Voltaire had grown up, for his father's notary duties gave him the right to lodgings there.) A great fire was lit, there was the stench of turpentine and billowing smoke, and then the executioner shredded the book and threw it into the flames.

Emilie was scared, but she was also infuriated at Voltaire again. This was the brutal, arbitrary world one suffered in France. Why hadn't Voltaire simply cross the border into the far safer Switzerland or to Rotterdam, and stayed out of further trouble? [84]

Ever since his return from England six years before, in 1728, he'd been developing contacts across France could carry out the financial transactions he wished. Instructions went out, by messengers on horseback, for his administrators to buy grain shipments from North Africa and ensure that the ships diverted to ports in Spain and Italy.... Voltaire sent out further instructions to purchase forage, cloth, and food at likely locations along the troop supply path. Quartermasters in the field can't bargain. Here tooVoltaire was buying cheap and selling dear. What he sold the army would bring in extra cash, and quickly.

It was ingenious, as always. But he had become used to finding unsuspected sources of income. In all the time since his play Oedipus was produced, back in 1718, not a single poem or play or essay he'd written have been allowed to be sold openly in France. Without his business skills he'd have had to end up as paid flatterer for a famous aristocrat or official in order to survive -- and his ambition was too great for that. [87]

This question of whether a government could be reformed from within was central to the young writers who are increasingly turning to Voltaire as their guide. The issue is certainly topical. Not only was the church utterly removed from the teachings of Jesus -- with spoiled children of rich families being brought positions as bishops, as we've seen -- but the basic administration was incompetent to a level that's hard to imagine today. [89]

the Paris Parliament in particular was run by near dynasties of religiously intense lawyers who believe that money was far better spent on radical preachers and on hospitals or public health measures. Dead bodies, for example, are kept in very shallow graves in churches across Paris. It was clear, as Voltaire wrote, that "this custom causes epidemic maladies every year, [because] the corruption resulting from so many bodies affects the air." But since it was a tradition, and holy, it wasn't going to be changed. [90]

Several of these [mid-level civil engineers who constantly had to struggle for funds and were infuriated that their budgets were dwarfed by what was wasted at court] engineers came to share the attitudes of the thinkers and writers who knew that Voltaire had been writing mocking accounts of their governments incompetence for years. They didn't think of themselves as forming an "Enlightenment" yet, and if they were certainly outnumbered by the ordinary readers and writers of cheap romances. But it was an important, waiting audience. [90]

Locke was an attractive guide for fresh writing, since -- like Descartes, but even more independently of past religious solutions -- he was known for proposing ways to calm thinking could reveal flaws in government administrations, as much as in the individual mind. One such flaws were revealed, then there was at least a chance of them being fixed. [92]

"Once I began to live in solitude... I was astonished at how much time I used to waste [in Paris], just tending my hair, or worrying about my appearance..." - Emilie

Château de Cirey, 1735-1736

The punishment for adultery could include whipping and being beaten with rods through the streets. It was always the woman who suffered most, for in the French code of the time, "adultery is punished in the person of the wife, and not that of the husband." [107]

Both she and Voltaire, accordingly, were ready to look closer at why it was that the nation they lived in had come up with such a harsh system. It was based on the Bible, of course -- that's where the king and all his officials said their authority came from -- so it was only natural that these first months at Cirey, Emilie and Voltaire decided to examine the Bible… they had texts of the Bible in French and Latin, and they ordered commentaries from Paris, all sorts of them, and reports in English, and texts printed in Latin -- especially those of Spinoza -- and they began to collate them and read sections aloud to each other, starting at their regular 11 AM coffee… after a while they began to assign each other a few verses of the Bible each morning, and then report on them in the afternoon. "I hardly spent two hours apart from him," Emilie remembered later…

By moving from Paris they knew they broken free of the traditional rules of society... rules insisting that monks and bishops of the church were in touch with the holy and so deserves whatever prerogatives that accumulated over the years. Now though, as they went through the books of the Old Testament, and then the new, they began to question the very foundations of those attitudes.

Until recently, they wouldn't have stood a chance. In much of the 1600s, there had been little notion of privacy for such important investigations. When a handful of dissidents in England did insist on a strange concept of "freedom of conscience," they ended up expelled from the civilized world to the distant reaches of rocky soil and the future Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

What Emilie and Voltaire were doing was creating a space where they can think for themselves... it was a portentous accomplishment…

in their fresh investigations of the Bible, Emilie was especially good at catching illogicalities. If Noah had brought onto his arc all the animals of the world, she jotted, and yet he had lived in the middle east, then how had he brought onboard the animals the recent explorers have shown to live uniquely in North America? There were other problems as well: a sun they could stand still, a Red Sea that could part, and all the other impossibilities that we today are used to viewing as metaphors but which at the time were, with few exceptions, taken as mysteries that everyone was expected to take as fully true.

It was one of the fundamental asked of the Enlightenment, this questioning the basis of belief that had been held for centuries. There was a great bravery here, for almost every law and procedure in society ultimately depended on traditional religious beliefs. Rich young man, as we saw, goodbye government posts and pocket the tax money that peasants and businessmen generated. This was allowable because the King decreed so, and the reason the Kings edicts were to be followed was because the church decreed that they were to be followed. There was the same justification for keeping anyone from a working -- or even professional-class background from being made an Army officer corps the Kings edicts were that they were to be excluded, and the church upheld with the king ruled. Undercut the church, on however obscure a theological point, and the whole chain might come undone.

In fact, what Emilie and Voltaire were doing wasn't entirely negative, for they were accusing the surface flaws in the Bible to reject everything about it. If they had, they would have been as close minded as the individuals they were critiquing. Years before, Voltaire had jotted down for himself what he felt about God, in the form of a prayer:

I'm not a Christian, but that's only to love Thee more closely,

People turn Thee into a tyrant - yet what I seek in Thee is a father.

Emilie was religious to. They had a chapel installed … and she attended regularly. Voltaire, ever uncomfortable with authority, didn't go as often, but in good weather he kept the doors leading out from his ground floor rooms open so that he could hear the services. They both wanted their biblical study to lead further… [110]

Now there was another way to analyze religious tradition: leaving science to the side for a while longer, and using the accounts of explorers and travelers to see how habits ferried around the world. There was a powerful civilization in China, for example, if from all accounts it didn't depend on anything like an established church. There also were descriptions of societies where women rule, or Eagles were worshiped, or children were never chastise. She accumulated several hundred pages of manuscript queries from their coffee mornings, trying to work out what could be left once the hard to believe literal biblical tales were pulled away.

From her notes and general reading, she recognized that what was considered good and bad varied from country to country. It was, she wrote, "like the rules of the game. Just as a move may be considered a mistak in one game, and be allowed another, so the terms virtue and vice will fit different acts in Paris and Constantinople." But what to do with that insight? [111]

she began to wonder if there are deeper ideas, beneath the surface, that don't change from culture to culture, despite the different ways people behave. As one example, she noted, in all societies it seems to be expected that people should keep their promises. The golden rule -- "do onto others as you would have others do unto you "-- also seem to be accepted almost everywhere. Even ordinary grammar gave insights about what's universal. In no language that she knew of was there on imperative of the verb "to be able." The reason, of course, is that all peoples recognize that we can't order someone to be capable of doing something that's beyond him…

"There is a universal law for all men, "she wrote, "which God himself has engraved on their hearts." [111] "It seems clear to me that there are natural laws [with] which men throughout the world must agree, even against their will." This too is a fundamental step in Enlightenment thinking, for it helps create the very idea that there could be a universal social science, looking for insights about behavior that would apply to everyone, rather than -- as previous history had generally implied -- just be random curios of human action, to be pulled from one separate society after another.

When Emilie was a child, there had been virtually no newspapers in the world. A handful of noble or extremely wealthy individuals who had direct access to courts or merchants knew what was going on... now, though, a new form of publication -- the "news gazettes" -- was becoming popular, and these were often just compilations of the sort of letters coming from Cirey. (Today's newspapers are a direct descendents of those gazettes, with many news articles still presented as if we merely happened to overhear a modified letter -- as with the label of reports "from our own foreign correspondent.") [114]

There were so few significant thinkers in France or any other country. Only a few hundred books were officially published a year in France, and a similarly low number in North America. (Today in the United States than 150,000 books are published each year: any one thinker is easily lost in that outpouring.) [114]

when people start to feel they should have the freedom to act as they wish in one sphere, it's natural to expect governments to respect them as individuals in other spheres. This was the attitude, after more vicissitudes of history, that led to such world-changing documents as Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, with its flamboyant listing of inalienable claims to life, liberty, and -- as two independent Cirey correspondents would have enthusiastically understood -- the pursuit of happiness. [115]

there was no reason why the purely financial arrangements of the marriage should get in the way of their friendship. The problem, rather, was that Emilie was young, yet Voltaire was old, over 40 already (and as he explained in confidence to his good friend..., his weakening health was now such that "I fear I am not long for this world"). Life expectancy was short, and poor nutrition, contaminated water, incompetent doctors, and constant low-grade infections they people age much more rapidly than in wealthy countries today. Even if someone did reach their 30s or even 40s, it was common to have bone loss from lack of fresh milk or cheese, bad teeth, damaged skin, breathing ailments, and much else steadily going wrong. [115]

Voltaire would now [1733] help Emilie write an account of everything Isaac Newton had done, presenting modern science in its full majesty. No one on the continent had dared to do that before. What bright young woman would not be thrilled to share in such a task?

There were, admittedly, a few problems. Newton had written his great Principia Mathematica text in Latin, and although Voltaire proudly quoted Latin epigrams with ease, it seems he couldn't read the language as easily as Emilie. Even worse, Newton's great book was densely loaded with the most advanced mathematics and Voltaire's aptitude for mathematics made his Latin skills seem impressive. "I am," he admitted to his mathematician friend Pitot, "like those brooks that are transparent because they are not deep... calculations tire me. [117]

They began with practical experiments, reconstructing procedures that Newton had described. It was cutting edge stuff. The salons of Paris knew nothing of this, for society hostesses were not going to be able to follow complex Latin texts and advanced mathematics. But even the Academy of Sciences was largely opposed to it, or even unaware of the details: the majority of members were sunk in the older, nearly mystic astronomical visions of Descartes. [117]

Soon they installed a telescope in that room, and gazed out at night to examine the incredible rings of Saturn; they brought Emilie's son out into the open gardens to see how the full moon appeared to grow larger as it neared the horizon; they immersed a straight rod in water and measured how abruptly it appeared to become jagged as a light they viewed it by had to push through the dense water; they took sketches that the first modern astronomers have made of orbiting planets, and transformed those into the crisp numbers of Newton's powerful equations. [118]

Voltaire was in his element. It always been a fast writer, once he got over his interminable delay in, and now, by mid-1736, when they finally had the builders away long enough for the hammering and banging to cease, he was flying. Everything made so much sense! When he met Emilie, back in 1733, they been so thrilled that had added his large section rebutting Pascal did nearly final draft of his letters from England. Pascal I believe that the fundamentally sinful, but Voltaire did not; as he recapped it at the time, "Pascal taught men to hate themselves; I'd rather teach them to love each other." Now means fission, as Emilie was explaining to him, also squared with his and families believe that the world was not fundamentally sinful. For the physical world was in a collection of accidents, but mountains O'Lakes randomly appearing in the middle of comments, and "we guilty beings deserving to inhabit the crumbling ruins" of our planet. Instead, he and Emilie prepared a section showing the interconnected, meaningful cycles of nature: the snow on mountain tops came from clouds and moisture in the air, and will melt and replace the riverbeds, which in turn will fill the seas, from which water vapor can evaporate to turn into range for farming or more snow up on the mountain tops. That's not the sign of a wrathful God, always wanting to terrorize his creations. The new science was backing up their philosophy and showing that Pascal's pessimism didn't have to be true.

Once again, this wasn't just a theological assertion, for they could see Newton's forces in exact action, leading to these harmonious results. The kindly Fontenelle have been unable even to imagine working out what gravity would feel like for any inhabitants are explorers of the planet Saturn -- as a little girl Emilie had heard of her father's table how this, alas, was forever beyond our ability. But now, with the insights from Newton, she was able to work out the pull of gravity on Saturn and the amount of sunlight that reached its great distance, and how much smaller our son would look, glittering over spring bursting horizon. It had been a possibility waiting in Newton's work, but it's not clear to anyone in the world to work through the details in exactly this way; certainly no one in France had.

… by the start of December 1736, his hundreds of manuscript pages were completed… the finished work was called The Elements Of Newton. [119] Voltaire's name alone went on the title page, for that was the usual order of things, it really should have listed them both.

[One 9 December 1736, Voltaire had to flee from an arrest warrant, so went to Brussels and the Netherlands.] "The way we're raised shapes our views... I would've been a Christian in Paris, but I'm a Muslim here." [line Voltaire gave to a fictional character Zaire] the play was also reminding the audience that wants to recognize how arbitrary is the world we been born to, then we start to have the chance to reshape our own lives.

This was quintessential Voltaire: transmitting groundbreaking philosophy by means of a commercial play, so well written, with all the twists and poles of an adventure plot, that it became a great popular success. [126]

[Voltaire met Gravesande, who was able to demonstrate that the impact of a moving object] depends precisely on the square of the speed. A few other researchers had suspected this might happen; 's Gravesande was one of the first to show they were right.

And Newton hadn't known it. [129]

Science … was written in much simpler language, be it the symbols of mathematics are just neutral, clear prose. Those particular writings might be as vulnerable to shifts in style or power as works of literature. But the underlying laws of science were different. They could cross all boundaries of extinction, all the voids of eternity and night. Voltaire realized that he was never going to come up with fresh ideas about how Saturn's moons orbiting. That was perhaps something Emilie could do, that it was too abstract for him, too far away in space. [129]

[A French man] could, of course, discipline his wife as he thought necessary. In French law, not only were women legally the same as children (aside from the financial protection of families might have arranged for them in their marriage contracts), but they had no legal protection against physical punishment from their spouses. [136]

Voltaire, when he put his mind to it, was the most charming man alive.

The trick, Voltaire knew, was never to pretend and affection you didn't feel. Any intelligent person could see through that. Rather, you need to find what you genuinely do like about a person and then go ahead and share that. [136]

In the previous century, Prussia had been brutalized by the 30 Years War, and up to a third of its population had been murdered or starved. The results have been a cowed civilian population, willing to do whatever the surviving military administration wished. The kingdom itself is only a recent creation, formed from a strip of what had been Polish territory, on a sandy, near worthless stretch of land around the small town of Berlin. It was a garrison state, and a sensitive Frederick was not even its commander. His father, Frederick William, was King. This meant that if Voltaire ever went there, he would be under the father's authority -- and Frederick William was not a normal person.

What he went out for lunchtime walks, he kicked any woman on the street he didn't like. If a clergyman was standing too close, watching one of the king's beloved guards regiments on Parade, Frederick William would take out a thick cane and beat the clergyman to the ground. He regularly punched his son, dragged him by the hair, and choked him with curtain cords. When Frederick, at 18, had tried to escape with a friend, the father had caught them, made Frederick watch as his friend was murdered, and locked Frederick in the dreaded Küstrin fortress, on the Oder. Only at 21, when the Crown Prince reach legal majority, was he trusted to be free…[143]

Emilie wasn't ill, and she wasn't asleep either. She was at her desk, over in her own candlelit rooms in the château. She'd seen that Voltaire was flailing in his experiments and she decided what she was going to do about it. She decided to enter the Academy's competition in secret, and on her own. [148]

"There's so much to do when you have a family, and a house to run," Emilie wrote. "So many unimportant details and obligations, that I barely get any time to read new books. I give up at how ignorant I am. If I were a man I'd... just get rid of all the useless things of my life." [155]

A final time passing pleasure was an innovation family had installed on the entry-level of the château: a private bathing room -- and one of the first in France. Having a bathtub for long soaking wouldn't have made sense in Paris, with all the excrement, urine, ligaments, and other items that poured into the Seine (and often polluted ostensibly fresher sources as well). But not only was the water cleaner in Cirey. There was something more to Emilie's innovation. It had to do with privacy.

Previous houses had usually been designed without corridors, and to get to a particular room, you simply walked through any other rooms that happened to be on the way. Whether the individuals you passed were praying, dressing, cooking, chatting, or defecating, you'd see them as you marched along. That was normal: even Louis XIV at first I had been comfortable chatting with appropriate nobles while seated on his "chaise percée," a chair that had a hole in the seat in a chamber pot beneath.

By the time Emilie and Voltaire had begun redesigning Cirey, though, they once again picked up on - and helped boost - a trend accepting the right to have more privacy. [164]

Our modern notion of optimism comes not so much from human affairs as from these early 18th Century studies of how trajectories can take the "optimum" path… Emilie was one of the very first people to use the word optimiste, and she did so in her mathematical analyses of these curves, in accord with her (and Leibniz's) belief that there is a beneficent deity behind the seemingly random events we see around us. An optimist was someone who believes that however complicated or random or odd a stretching curve might seem, if we had enough insight then we could understand the simple guiding principle from which it actually came. The concept then spread from mathematics to mean anyone who believes that such an optimal path can open up in life. [177]

[Emilie's embrace of optimism led to a rift in their relationship.]

In medieval times, before modern science, it had been easy to accept that God shaped everything that we saw orbit room. There were no "coincidences," because they were no separate, freely moving causal lines to "go-inside." But the scientific revolution to change that. Voltaire believed that almost everything we saw around us really was just the result of chance.

He liked that, for since the details of what we experienced were not all part of a complex divine plan, then we had the opportunity to reach out, intervene, and perform the world around us. In the mid-evil view, for example, God ordained when and where disease was to occur. In the modern view -- as Voltaire saw it -- disease happened because, for example, taxes were being misused and so clean water wasn't supplied to city slums. The French administration couldn't do anything about it divinely ordained disease, but it could certainly work to get more efficient government officers who would ensure that everyone had fresh water.

… Voltaire believed in straight, narrow reason to fix things. Emilie saw a world of more subtle interrelationships.

Newton had shown the universe was constructed in such a way that we could never know what the underlying nature of any object really was. All we could accurately do was describe its surface behavior.

This was an astonishing thought, for it led to heresy of the most extreme sort. If we could presume to understand the inner thoughts of others, for example, then we'd would have no reason to torture them to ensure they shared our religious beliefs. The essence of the French state, however, was that the king and his officers were at one with the church. If someone was suspected of running a Protestant religious service, that person was to be tortured and brutalized with the state's full support. Protestant vicars were hanged; individuals attending Protestant services had often been arrested, beaten, and... sent to be slaves on Mediterranean galleys. There was no private realm into which the state couldn't delve. [185]

Voltaire now wanted to be more than a critic. He wanted to change the world. [185]

He'd loved the style of thinking that science gave him. What if he used that, and examined politics with the crisp, unbiased approach of Newton? It would mean peering at the French or British monarchs as if getting a fresh view of them through a telescope. Those monarchs, for example, were used to saying that they deserved our deference because their authority descended from the distant past -- in the case of the French monarchy, from Charlemagne himself. But Voltaire asked why that should matter. [185]

That was the approach Voltaire could use: ignore what the king's ancestors had once done and instead ask the important question of whether the King today is efficient and fair enough to justify our deference.

This was yet another fundamental step in the enlightenment. (It is, for example, the core argument in the Declaration of Independence.) [186]

[Crown Prince Frederick] had already disbanded those regiments. He had banned torture from any civilian courts in his kingdom; he had declared freedom of religion (at least to Christians); he was in the process of sending all censorship. [188]

this wasn't anything like the application of Enlightenment ideas that Voltaire had been looking for… At Versailles, however, truth was determined in a different way. But the king wanted was true, and what his top advisers wanted could also become true. Science didn't matter. The hierarchy of court determine what could be thought and what can be said.

Everything was crumbling. Voltaire had begun an affair with his now widowed niece Marie-Louise - incest between uncle and niece was much less abhorrent in Catholic countries then than it is now - but although that was thrilling for him at the start, she was a bit more cynical about it. [211]

The church still paid virtually no tax, even though it supported many thousands of officials of no discernible religious inclination: the government pay for almost all their needs, despite their enormous landed estates. A new finance minister, John-Baptiste de Machault, was proposing a minimum 5% tax, to at least begin to rectify this injustice. [258]

[Emilie became pregnant.] Even if gossip is spreading that Saint-Lambert had been her lover, she and her husband had to at least make it seem plausible that Florent-Claude was the father of any living child she had. That was the only way to guarantee that the du Châtelet and de Breteuil inheritances stayed within the family. (Abortion would only have been considered as a desperate resort, for the ergot or other potions used for this purpose were highly dose sensitive: too little and there was no effect, too much and fatal uterine bleeding would result.)

Emilie knew enough to be wary of most medical remedies but did accept the consensus that moderate bleeding by surgeons was sometimes a sensible precaution to take. She went to Versailles, where the surgeons went through the procedure. First they tied a tourniquet around her arm to the veins in her forearm swelled up. Then they brought out the mechanical marvel known as the scarificator: a small brass box, about a dozen spring-loaded blades inside. The blades were extremely sharp, and released in groups to cut into her. While that was going on, an assistant was heating the cupping glasses that would be applied over the open gashes. As the cups cooled the vacuum inside helped pull even more blood out. [270]

Stanislas … was trying to merge Catholic traditions with rational science and had many questions for her. He was sincere in his religion, a good Polish Catholic, if he didn't quite believe the graphic stories of damnation that father menu tried to scare him with. He picked up fragments from Emilie and Voltaire about a different view. That's what he wants to know more about.

It was a significant precedent, for in the decades to come many other seemingly conventional individuals would be inspired by Voltaire and Emilie -- by their writings, and by the example of their unconventional life together -- the question traditions around them that had apparently been accepted since time immemorial. With this attitude, authority no longer had to come from what you were told by a priest or royal official, and the whole establishment of the established church or the state behind them. He could now come, dangerously, from small, portable books -- and even from ideas you came to yourself. [271]

[Newton's] was the sort of genius that had arisen only a very few times in human history -- but Newton didn't publish what they found. He knew that what he kept secret could never be criticized by anyone else. When the plague ended and he returned to Cambridge, he seems to have told almost no one of what he now knew. For decades became immersed in secret worlds: alchemy, biblical interpretation, and discovering the truth about Solomon's ancient temple, scribbling his results in volume after volume of cryptic notes. [274]

Emilie du Châtelet gave birth on the night of September 3 [1749]. She died on September 10 of infections stemming from the labor; the child - a girl - died soon after. Her translation and commentary on Newton's Principia became fundamental to key 18th-century developments in theoretical physics, laying the groundwork for much of contemporary science.

Voltaire was bereft: "I've lost the half of myself - a soul for which mine was made." Months later, after Voltaire had abandoned Cirey and moved back to Paris, Longchamp would find him wandering at night in the apartments he'd shared with Emilie, plaintively calling her name in the dark. [281]

In 1758, at age 64, he settled in the small town of Ferney, just across from Geneva, yet inside the French border. He lived there for 20 years, publishing Candide and other works, leading public intervention against cases of religious persecution, and encouraging Diderot and others associated with the vast progressive Encyclopédie project. [287]

Voltaire died in Paris, aged 84, a decade before the French Revolution, feted by crowds of admirers. In his final eulogy of Emilie, he'd written:

Her memory is treasured by all who knew her intimately, and who were capable of perceiving the breadth of her mind.

The grimly turreted Bastille prison had fewer political prisoners as the years went on. In 1789, when it was stormed by the citizens of Paris, only seven inmates were left inside: four forgers, two lunatics, and one aristocrat (who'd been consigned to the prison by his family). A café stands on the location today. [287]

Frederick the Great's unceasing militarism led to the catastrophe of the Seven Years War, which saw his country of approximately 5,000,000 people engaged in at times simultaneous battle against an array of enemies -- Russia, France, Austria, Sweden, and others -- with a combined population of about 100 million. Prussia's citizens were murdered and brutalized in a manner that hadn't been seen in Europe for centuries. The result was a terrified, blindly obedient Prussian citizenry and brutally efficient officer corps.

The huge debt that Britain incurred in supporting Frederick led to Parliament calling for the distant American colonies to pay their fair share -- a call that was received with a noted lack of enthusiasm by the 13 colonies was a proximate cause of the American Revolution. [290]

Emilie's son, Louis-Marie Florent, rose in the royal administration to become the ambassador of Louis XVI to the English court. During the revolution he was guillotined in the Place de la Révolution, just yards from the river Seine. His own son died in prison, thus ending the du Châtelet line.

Partly ransacked during the revolution the Château de Cirey is now occupied by a private family, which has invested considerable funds in restoring it. Open to the public every afternoon from July to mid September, it's conveniently reachable from Paris's Gare de l'Est. [293]

UK Guardian Review:

Love in the library

Patricia Fara enjoys David Bodanis's Passionate Minds, a vivid evocation of Emilie du Châtelet, and her lover, Voltaire

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Patricia Fara

The Guardian, Saturday 10 June 2006

Article history

Buy Passionate Minds at the Guardian bookshop

Passionate Minds: The Great Enlightenment Love Affair

by David Bodanis

312pp, Little, Brown, £17.99

Émilie du Châtelet, wrote Voltaire, "was a great man whose only fault was being a woman". Du Châtelet has paid the penalty for being a woman twice over. During her own lifetime, she struggled to obtain the education and publishing opportunities that she craved. And since her death, she has been cast in the role of Voltaire's mistress, as though she were his possession or at best an intelligent secretary. But Voltaire himself knew better - he celebrated her as a "great & powerful Genius", an accolade echoed in Passionate Minds by David Bodanis, a popular science writer whose racy love story describes how the Enlightenment's great rationalist was "bested by a woman intellectually superior to him".

From childhood, Du Châtelet (1706-49) resented the discrimination that made it impossible for her to pursue the same career as a man. Trapped between the sexes, she conformed to conventions by shopping, dancing and gambling with abandon, but she also displayed a masculine dedication to Newtonian natural philosophy - when deadlines were close, she scarcely slept, plunging her hands into ice-cold water to keep herself awake. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant admired her intellect, yet sneered that "a woman who ... conducts learned controversies on mechanics like the Marquise de Chatelier might as well have a beard".

Her unusually enlightened father gave the rebellious girl an education more typical for boys. She could apparently speak six languages by the time she was 12, and in her 20s she started to immerse herself in Newtonianism, still regarded as a philosophical heresy in Cartesian France. By then, Du Châtelet was married to an older army officer, had given birth to three children, and was becoming suspiciously friendly with two other men. She persuaded one of them to teach her mathematics, but fell passionately in love with the other - Voltaire, on the run from the police for his political views. After packing him off to her country estate, Du Châtelet eventually agreed to abandon her Parisian adventures (well, more or less), and the lovers became embroiled in a private world of intense intellectual activity punctuated by stormy separations.

One early priority was to stock the library. They amassed 21,000 books - more than in most European universities - and established a rigorous regime of study. As well as lavishly decorating her private rooms (carefully colour-coordinating the dog-basket), Du Châtelet took over the great hall, where she tested Newton's theories with wooden balls swinging from the rafters. Luxuriating in the first stages of their tempestuous affair, Voltaire and Du Châtelet joined forces to produce an introductory and hugely successful book on Newtonian philosophy. Although only his name appears on the title page, the frontispiece portrays her hovering above his head, reflecting Newton's divine wisdom down on to Voltaire's hand as he assiduously transcribes the words of his female muse. "She dictated and I wrote," he told a friend.

Voltaire soon retreated from abstract physics to his more familiar territory of plays and politics, but Du Châtelet continued to explore the latest scientific theories. "I used to teach myself with you," he lamented, "but now you have flown up where I can no longer follow." Her most ambitious project was to translate and explain the Principia, Newton's great Latin book on gravity - and hers remains the only complete version in French. Bodanis reports a visitor's astonishment at her abilities: "The text was written in Latin, and yet she read it (aloud) in French. She hesitated a moment at the end of each sentence. I didn't understand why, then saw it was to work through the calculations on the pages." For Du Châtelet, translation meant more than just converting words into another language - she explained the complex mathematics in elegant prose, translated Newton's geometry into calculus, and summarised the current state of Newtonian research.

Constrained by family responsibilities, Du Châtelet worked thoroughly but intermittently - until she discovered that she was pregnant. Although Voltaire was not the father, he valiantly helped her deceive her husband into thinking that the baby was legitimate. Aged 43, an elderly woman by contemporary standards, Du Châtelet was plagued by gloomy premonitions. Stepping up her heavy schedule, she worked long hours to finish only days before the baby's birth and her death. Bodanis ends his own book by describing Voltaire wandering through their Parisian flat, "plaintively calling her name in the dark".

Passionate Minds focuses on the intense relationship between two strong-willed people, vividly charting their quarrels and reconciliations over 15 years. Written in a zippy, sometimes over-colloquial style ("there they went at it some more"), this is an absorbing tale based on extensive research, and it takes full advantage of both heroes' propensity for coining quotable witticisms. Nevertheless, the book's scholarly solidity is exaggerated. Although Bodanis condemns Nancy Mitford, an earlier biographer, for knowing "as much about science as a shrub", his own account of Newton's prism experiment is wrong. Furthermore, there is no index, the 50 pages of notes are spaced out in large type, and Bodanis fails to reveal that many intimate letters were destroyed, probably by Voltaire himself.

Bodanis eloquently evokes women's restricted lives during the 18th century, when they were squeezed out of universities and scientific societies and crammed into corsets and hooped dresses so wide that gossips were unable to exchange whispers. As he argues convincingly, Du Châtelet was able to fulfil at least some of her intellectual ambitions by refusing to perform conventionally. Yet in redeeming her reputation, Bodanis overstates his case. Enthusiastically crediting her with laying the foundations for photography, infrared radiation and relativity theory, he converts her into a misunderstood scientist of unbelievable prescience and so replicates the one-sided approach he claims to be avoiding.

· Patricia Fara is a fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. Her recent books include Pandora's Breeches: Women, Science and Power in the Enlightenment (Pimlico)

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