Passionate Minds

by David Bodanis

  About two decades later, Robert Darnton, whose father and brother had been notable New York Times reporters—and who briefly tried that career himself—began looking at the practicalities of what it really meant to be a writer or publisher in eighteenth-century France. He hunted in old archives and police transcripts—think of an on-the- scene tabloid photographer, but with a Ph.D.—till he brought back to life the travails of exhausted pamphleteers, under-the-counter booksellers, police spies, and everyone else who created the actual networks of communication used in France then.

  It was an ingenious way of extending work of the French Annales school, which used a mix of economics, statistical research, and cognitive anthropology to open up a dense history from below, where cheap, massively popular thrillers of political pornography were more important than grand treatises of political theory. A later generation of historians has corrected some of Darnton's exuberance, yet continues his approach of looking at every aspect of the Enlightenment through fresh lenses, finally getting away from the left-wing/right-wing categories that had oversimplified much earlier work.

  Du Châtelet's role as anything more than a sexy mistress took a long time to be accepted, and it was only the work of the immensely conscientious Princeton scholar Ira O. Wade that showed how important and creative she'd been. Wade was publishing this as far back as the 1940s, but although a diligent man, he seems to have trained at the Immanuel Kant school of expository prose: he was a terrible writer. Only with a fresh generation of feminist scholars, especially from the 1970s on, did more serious attention go to her.

  There had, I found out, been a few popular biographies even before this—most notably Nancy Mitford's 1957 biography of Voltaire that included this period in his life. But along with lacking many of the most important letters, Mitford knew little about science. Since du Châtelet's life was focused on science, the result was a cutout character who had dashing adventures, but for no discernible reason—like writing the life of Winston Churchill but leaving out the politics.

  Voltaire was luckier in his biographers, not least because his letters have always been easily accessible—he lived long enough to ensure that—and because his writings are so catchy. But his biographers also often downplayed the role of science in shaping his life, which inevitably meant downplaying du Châtelet as well.

  It's a pleasure to change that finally, and do justice to our characters by bringing back the science that had been so important to them both. But I also realized that it was important I didn't overemphasize that and produce merely another one-sided view. Instead I've concentrated on their love and built a narrative around that. It's the most vivid way I know to illustrate the subtle, often barely seen cultural shifts of the early Enlightenment: a way of making two long-gone individuals come back to life, in all their stumbling excitement and fears.

  Author's Note

  Throughout the book I call du Châtelet by her first name, and Voltaire by his last—which seems unfair, except that this is often how the two referred to each other. The name du Châtelet wasn't what our heroine was born with, nor what she chose, and when it came to teasing her male friends, she'd often write that they were one of her Emiliens. Voltaire, by contrast, was a name that our hero chose, and by which he did like to be referred to.

  Translations presented more of a difficulty. Voltaire reads very easily in French, but literal translations—especially of his poetry— make him sound too mannered. To avoid that, although the prose translations are fairly neutral, the poetry translations are very liberal, at times almost paraphrases. This is actually the approach Emilie and Voltaire took when they did translations themselves: freely dropping and adding words to make writers come out as they felt they should. Some of the translations are my own, or by other recent authors; others are by contemporaries of our protagonists, to even better capture the style of their time.

  …You are beautiful

  so half the human race will be your enemy

  You are brilliant

  and you will be feared

  You are trusting

  and you will be betrayed…

  —V, “Epistle on Calumny,” 1733, soon after meeting Emilie (everything he predicted came true)

  Prologue

  CIREY, FRANCE, LATE JUNE 1749

  Alone, after dinner. Through the long window leading to her terrace the low hills of eastern France were barely visible in the dusk. She'd loved this house, her home, but after a decade spent with François, the man she'd lived for above all others, their life together had begun to shatter.

  In his place she'd thought she'd found a better man, younger and more handsome, but then he too had turned cool to her. She'd tried to avoid admitting it at first (“illusion is not something you can have if it is not in your nature. However, you can avoid looking behind the scenes”), but his coldness never ended: she was experienced with men, and knew when passion was over.

  A turn from the window: it was time to get back to work. The servants had lit the numerous candles on her table, and her manuscript was where she'd left it. She sat on the white taffeta chair. It was comforting to be back here after Paris, with the panels she'd commissioned from Watteau's workshop on the wall around her, her dog's basket beside her bedroom, her library through the doorway beyond.

  In his own wing of the château, François was at his writing table too, the blank manuscript sheets for the play he was working on stacked beside him. If he was lucky, the play would bring him back into the king's favor and make up for the catastrophe during his last visit to Paris; there were important governmental reforms to work on as well.

  He also had a mistress waiting in Paris, who was sending enticingly sultry letters, but he was getting tired of her. And how could she compare with Emilie, his one great love, the woman he'd shared so many years with? They weren't lovers anymore, but they had a bond that was deeper than in their years of first passion so long ago.

  They would never abandon each other. Back in her room, facing the long window and the river, Emilie was ready to start her night's work. Her hair was still thick, dense with dark curls, but she was graying in front. She had her diamonds on, and now reached for her quill. It was very quiet at the château. The moonlight that streamed past her angled onto the lace pillows at the head of her bed. The mathematics was getting harder. She was in her forties, nearing the final stages of pregnancy, and convinced that she was unlikely to survive the labor that would soon come. Some of her friends had tried to chide her out of that worry, but François knew her better than anyone else. He understood that she wasn't angry, just disappointed that she would have to leave before she was ready.

  What could make a life worthwhile once love has faded? The great Isaac Newton had created modern science, yet his work had been incomplete at his death. She knew how to bring out Newton's most important, hidden truths about how gravitation worked and what those detailed workings might reveal about God's intentions for us. She'd also begun to glimpse her own powerful insights about the way energy that seemed to be used up in one part of the universe could instantly appear in another part, to keep the overall balance unchanged. She'd worked on her book bringing those all together for years, and was close to the end now. Maybe she would have enough time to finish it. If she succeeded, its memory could last for centuries.

  She lifted the quill, then dipped it in the open ink pot.

  1

  Emilie

  PARIS AND VERSAILLES, 1706–1725

  Gabrielle Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, just ten years old, sitting at the grown-ups' dinner table, her wavy hair pinned tight in yet another effort to keep it in place, was straining to follow the words of the visitor her father had brought to their Paris mansion this Thursday night. His name was Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, and she'd heard he was a famous scientist. He was talking about the distant stars.

  He was explaining that they are huge suns like our own, with inhabited planets around them. That shouldn't terrify her, he went on, for it means
we no longer have to feel oppressed, pinned down on our one small planet. Instead, we should gaze outward and breathe freely. “Nothing is so beautiful to visualize as this prodigious number of [solar systems], each with a sun at its center making planets rotate around it.”

  Emilie listened, rapt. It was dark outside, and the light from more than a dozen candles filled the room; the servants worked quietly amidst the glasses and plates and silver serving trays. This was one of the first times she had been allowed to stay up so late. Even better, Fontenelle was scarcely paying attention to anyone else.

  Emilie's elderly father, Louis-Nicolas, 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. But he also knew that Emilie's excitement at learning didn't find favor with everyone. Her mother, Gabrielle-Anne, was also at the table—and she was distinctly not amused.

  Gabrielle-Anne was one of those once-beautiful women who forever remain unhappy in life, however wealthy they are. “I don't think that anyone ever saw her smile,” a regular visitor remarked, “except in a weary, condescending way.” She'd been brought up in a convent, where the most important knowledge was how to maintain your social position, and the most intellectually complex instruction had been needlepoint. For years she'd tried to instill in Emilie the only kind of advice she felt a girl needed. The rules were legion:

  “Don't ever blow your nose on your napkin—you might think I don't have to tell you, but the Montesquieu brothers blow theirs on the tablecloths, and it's disgusting. Break your bread rather than cut it (and break the bottom of your soft-boiled eggs when you're done so that the servants won't send them rolling off the plate onto you)…. Never, ever comb your hair in church. You must be careful with the word monseigneur, it is pronounced differently for a prince of the Church and for a prince of the blood. And when a priest's in the room, always give him the chair nearest the fire and serve him first at meals, even if he's at the bottom of the table.”

  The mother had even tried sending Emilie to formal infant balls, where children arrived in miniature carriages and were supposed to remain for hours, showing off their bouquets, remarking on the goblets and furnishings and each other's clothes. But Emilie had been bored and showed it.

  Making it even worse at the Breteuil table this Thursday night was Emilie's fourteen-year-old cousin Renée-Caroline. She was cross, for she wasn't used to being ignored. In the past few months, since she'd moved into the Breteuil home, she'd been the favored girl. She was everything a mother could hope for: compliant, pretty, and always wearing the right clothes.

  For hours on end she would happily gossip with Gabrielle-Anne, talking about fashion and etiquette, and the quite embarrassing weakness of the father's family, which had been ennobled for scarcely two centuries—a sad contrast to Gabrielle-Anne and Renée-Caroline's notably more distinguished, if not quite so wealthy, family. (“When we spoke about such nobles of the second rank,” Renée-Caroline recounted, “we were careful to look sideways to be sure our words didn't offend them—as one would if speaking about hunchbacks or redheads.”) The mother gave this newcomer all the approval she withheld from her daughter.

  Emilie had desperately wanted to join them, but she could never quite say or do the right thing. If she did try, she was more likely to blurt out some complex question in philosophy or theology. She would have been better off asking about fashion. “She was so confused and pedantic,” Renée-Caroline remembered. “She wanted us to think she understood everything.” Her mother and cousin just sighed.

  Renée-Caroline had even convinced Gabrielle-Anne to kick Emilie out of the attractive upstairs bedroom that overlooked the Tuileries, letting herself move there instead. Emilie was relegated to small ground-floor rooms, looking out on a wall. “I don't believe there's anyone on earth who can feel despised without becoming despondent,” Emilie wrote later. “Public scorn is a worse torture than the law can inflict, because it doesn't go away.”

  Now, though, at the dinner table, in her father's encouraging presence, and with the dinner guest focusing on her, she was able to escape into the wondrous world of science. Fontenelle told the ten-year-old Emilie about the thick band of white in the night sky called the Milky Way, and explained that this too was but a seeding of worlds, in far greater number than we could imagine. Experienced visitors from those distant stars might call out to new passengers as they entered our solar system, “You will soon discover a planet which has a great ring around it”—and so Saturn would be a floating navigation beacon for them to use.

  Emilie was entranced with what might lie out there in space. According to Fontenelle, it seemed impossible that anyone on Earth could possibly weigh distant Saturn, or determine the temperature there. But what might be discovered in the future if you really used your mind?

  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. But Louis-Nicolas knew how bright his daughter was, so quick in her thoughts, and he didn't see why he shouldn't help her.

  Even when Emilie had been younger, and often clumsy as a little girl, he'd encouraged her in physical activities such as supervised horse riding and fencing. Now he began to bring tutors to the house for her. As the years went on, she translated Virgil and learned to read Tasso in the original Italian; she had the pleasure of memorizing long stretches of Lucretius and Horace as well. “Men can choose lots of ways to achieve glory,” Emilie wrote, looking back, “… but women can not. Yet when someone is born with a soul that wants more, at least solitary study is there to console them.”

  Gabrielle-Anne was horrified at her daughter's progress and fought her husband at every step, at one point even trying to get Emilie sent away to a locked convent. That would have been a catastrophe for Emilie. Even the most distinguished girls' school, located outside Paris, had no significant studies, and allowed only a single thirty-minute visit with parents every three months. Punishment at elite convent 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 that she never recovered.) Fortunately for Emilie, her father managed to hold out against the convent.

  But even though she got to study, she was still lonely—and could scarcely leave the house. If she went to the front of their mansion, when the staff went in and out on errands, at best she could see the open Paris streets beyond, and the king's private Louvre palace in the distance. It wasn't becoming for a female to explore on her own, and it was also too dangerous—not just at night, when, as her two older brothers had taught her, knife-wielding killers and the ghosts of the dead and carriers of plague roamed, but even during the day, when mutilated beggars would defecate under the yew trees in the Tuileries beside the old clay quarries there, and huge wooden carriages would jounce past while groups of restless policemen with thick cudgels watched the crowds. She was constrained to stay in.

  As time passed, she realized that her protective father wouldn't be there forever. She had exactly two alternatives in life: either she could marry into a family that would keep her well or she really could be sent to a convent. Only this time it would be not just for a few years of education but to stay for the rest of her life, amid women who'd been disfigured by smallpox, or who'd been considering marrying beneath them, or—perhaps the majority—whose parents were simply unwilling to waste the funds to send a daughter out into any suitable family at all. It was not a biological clock but a financial one that now began to tick.

  To make it harder, her father's income had gone down. For many years he had been chief of etiquette at Versailles and had earned a great deal by negotiating with foreign dignitaries to give them access to the king. After Louis XIV died, however, in 1715, that had stopped. Emilie's
dowry—crucial to help pull in a spouse—was only medium-sized.

  Luckily, though, when Emilie was fifteen—in 1721—something began to happen that tormented Renée-Caroline, still a regular visitor, more than ever. Emilie had been lanky and awkward as a child (“my cousin was three or four years younger than me,” Renée-Caroline wrote, “but she was at least five or six inches taller”). Now, though, Emilie filled out. Her face took on an attractive oval shape, her hazel eyes widened, and she became, if not the perfect beauty that her mother had been, then a tall young woman who was very fit and very confident.

  This could be her escape route. At age sixteen she was sent to live at court, to see what man she could attract with her mix of beauty and money—and with luck she wouldn't say too much to put him off. The purpose, as every woman understood, was to get a man who, in the later immortal words of Dorothy Parker, should be wealthy, loyal, and dumb.

  But although Emilie didn't want the convent, she still was choosy. She was realistic enough to know that she wasn't going to find a man who would stimulate her creativity. But she also didn't want the standard life of a wealthy married woman, and needed someone who would at least give her the space to keep on studying.

  It didn't help that since the recent death of Louis XIV the court had been run by a regent, who encouraged a sensual indulgence in his own life and among his courtiers that the old king hadn't allowed for decades. Since the most ridiculous of the fops, officers, and gamblers at Court wouldn't leave her alone, Emilie had to come up with a plan to show she was serious. As one account has it, she simply challenged the chief of the royal household guard, Jacques de Brun, to a sword fight.

  De Brun was an experienced soldier and might have thought this was madness, barely worth lifting a weapon, but Emilie knew what she was doing. They wouldn't use their swords to try to kill, but the spectacle of her having to take off her formal dress and squaring up against this professional soldier would bring as many of the nobles as could manage to circle around and watch.