In the meantime, scholars on the Continent had begun to pick up hints that something was wrong, and the gossip mills inflated the disaster. Rumor reached Christiaan Huygens that Newton had lost more than a year to what was called frenzy, a condition attributed both to overwork and to a fire that was supposed to have destroyed Newton's laboratory and a portion of his papers. Huygens told Leibniz, and Leibniz talked to his friends. With each telling, Newton deteriorated, until by 1695, Johann Sturm, a professor at the University of Altdorf, reported back to an English correspondent the story of the fire, now so enlarged as to consume not just a shed and some notes, but Newton's house, library, and all his worldly possessions. Sturm described what seems to have been the Continental consensus: the greatest natural philosopher of the age had become "so disturbed in mind thereupon, as to be reduced to very ill circumstances."
The fire seems to have been a pure invention, a nicely mechanical cause to explain how the author of the Principia could descend into a delirium so consuming that (again, in rumor) he failed to recognize his own book. But even if his intellectual rivals leapt a little too eagerly to the conclusion that the giant in their midst had fallen, the fact of Newton's collapse remains.
What had actually happened? Newton's derangement was certainly connected, by time, place, and emotional logic, to the fate of his alchemical investigation. But there was another element in the mix, one that Newton never discussed: the end of his nearest approximation to romantic love.
A wealth of myth has sprung up around Newton's emotional life, and the possible existence of a sexual one. He was an irascible man, a great hater. Hooke and Leibniz were only the most famous of those he detested. He did not make friends easily, especially as a young man, and seemed not to mind the resulting solitude. He was not much of a joiner. He never married. Without doubt, he was a prude. Hence the legend of the bloodless semidivine hero of the mind—as Halley put it, of the figure whom "nearer the gods no mortal may approach."
But for all such adulation then and since, the real Newton was a human being, capable of great feeling—affection as well as enmity, loyalty as well as implacable disdain. At least once in his life he demonstrated that he could go so far as to feel a bond with another person stronger than mere friendship. That man was a young Swiss mathematician, Nicholas Fatio de Duillier.
Fatio, then just twenty-five years old, probably met Newton at a Royal Society meeting on June 12, 1689, at which Huygens was scheduled to speak. Newton had come to hear the man who was his nearest intellectual equal, and at some point in the course of the evening he was introduced to the younger man.
They got on from the start. Less than a month after the Royal Society encounter, Fatio joined Huygens to accompany Newton to Hampton Court to seek King William's patronage for the Englishman who had written the Principia. The expedition came to nothing, but the fact that Fatio was included in the company was a measure of how much pleasure his company gave Newton.
There was much to like. An undated portrait shows a handsome, even striking young man with large, luminous eyes and a flirtatious half smile. He was more than a mere beauty, however. He was enough of a mathematician to catch at least one error in the Principia, and apparently considered editing a second edition of the book himself. He was just wise enough not to overplay his hand. As he admitted to Huygens, for all of his pride in catching a mistake or two in the great work, "I was frozen stiff when I saw what Mr. Newton has accomplished."
Even better, he was a born disciple. Early in their acquaintance, Newton, having only just returned to Cambridge, wrote to Fatio of his plans to go back up to London to see him. Fatio replied, "I had a design to go see you at Cambridge; but you send me word you will come hither, which I am very glad of." More than glad, it turned out, for Fatio was trying in his own way to emulate his hero, going so far as to attempt a new interpretation of Newton's conception of the mutual attraction between bodies: "My Theory of Gravity," Fatio wrote, "is now I think clear of objections and I can doubt little but that is the true one." But who is he to say so, when the master is at hand? "You may better judge when you see it," Fatio told Newton, with all due deference. (In fact, another of Newton's friends, the mathematician David Gregory, reported, "Mr Newton and Mr Hally laugh at Mr Fatios manner of explaining gravity.") He declared himself not only Newton's "most humble and most obedient Servant," but one who was "with all my heart" devoted to Newton's service.
Newton was smitten. After the summer of 1689, he made sure that on his next visit to London, he took rooms in the same house with Fatio. The two stayed together for as much as a month in March 1690, Fatio acting as Newton's secretary, transcribing revisions to the Principia. Already, less than a year into their acquaintance, Newton devoted more time to the company of a single person than he had ever done before or would do again.
That first, intense involvement ended fairly quickly. Fatio returned to the Netherlands, and Huygens in June. He stayed away for fifteen months. With distance between them, he seems to have withdrawn from the pull of Newton's attention—at least, Newton complained in a note to Locke that Fatio had remained silent for months.
Nonetheless, when Fatio returned to England in September 1691, Newton immediately traveled up to London. Over the next year and a half, the two men remained in regular contact, when Newton came to the capital and at least once when he received Fatio in his rooms in Cambridge. They still talked natural philosophy, but the relationship and its overt focus shifted. Newton began to honor Fatio with secrets he revealed only to Boyle and Locke and perhaps a few others. In the clearest expression of the value he placed on this one young man, he opened his most intimate thoughts, enlisting Fatio as his alchemical acolyte.
Throughout the early 1690s, Fatio eagerly followed his mentor into the secret corners of the Newtonian cosmos. Newton composed his last version of Index Chemicus and then Praxis during the years of his most intense affection for Fatio, and both were probably at least partly intended to be personalized texts, composed for a beloved disciple by the first and greatest truly quantitative alchemist in history.
Few details survive of Fatio's own alchemical research, but in the spring of 1693, he sent Newton an account of an experiment with mercury for use in a reaction with gold. The report reflects Newton's insistence on sound laboratory procedure. Fatio specified the instruments used: "a wooden mortar that hath a pestill allmost so big as to fill exactly the mortar"; he notes the efforts to reduce impurities in the preparation; he describes as exactly as possible the sequence of events as the mixture changes color and sprouts "a heap of trees out of the matter."
This was flattery by imitation. Fatio did the same across the range of Newtonian passions—besides his dabbling in alchemy and his rather feckless attempt to make sense of gravity, he followed Newton into scriptural exegesis, writing about the interpretation of prophecy, the temptation of Adam and "the serpent being there the Roman Empire." Such earnest prose on Newton's subjects, all in echoes of Newton's own rhythm and voice! It is a familiar spectacle, an ancient one: a comely, talented youth craving the attention and submitting to the loving instruction of an older, powerful man.
***
It did not last.
Fatio wavered first. He fell ill in the autumn of 1692, and painted a dire picture for Newton: "I have Sir allmost no hopes of seeing you again," he wrote. He had picked up a terrible cold on his last visit to Cambridge, and it had settled in his lungs. Disaster followed disaster—something that felt like the rupture of an ulcer in his lungs, a fever, deepening mental confusion. This could really be the end, Fatio warned, though he admitted he had not yet seen a doctor, who "may save my life." Should the worst happen, a friend "will acquaint you with what may befall me."
Newton replied in a frenzy of advice and sympathy. On September 21, he wrote, "I ... received your letter wth wch how much I was affected I cannot express." He gave orders: "Pray procure ye advice & assistance of Physitians before it be too late." No excuses were permitted: "if you want an
y money I will supply you." All this, "with my prayers for your recovery" from "your most affectionate and faithfull friend to serve you."
Fatio wrote again the next day, acknowledging his friend's concern: "I give You Sir my most humble thanks again, both for your prayers," he wrote, "and for your kindness to me." Apparently his earlier report had been a false alarm, an eruption of Fatio's gift for self-dramatization. But there seemed to be another reason for his shift in tone, now not only markedly less urgent than Newton's but with none of the ardor of the eager early days of their friendship. Fatio was polite, even graceful, and signed off as his friend's "most humble, most obedient and most obliged Servant." But that was simply the conventional formula, more polite than felt.
Newton caught the shift. For the only time on record, he acknowledged dependence, fear, a kind of desire. He began to beg. He suggested that London's evil air might be damaging his friend's health. The solution: come to Cambridge, "so to promote your recovery & save charges till you can recover I [am] very desirious you should return hither." Newton offered money, a home, care, whatever it took to secure the health—and favor—of his companion. Fatio resisted all temptation, but left Newton with a hint of hope. He wrote back that he had decided to return to Switzerland, inquiring coolly, "I should be glad Sr to know whether your occasions will possibly bring you to London before I go away."
But then he intimated that he might yet return to England, and if he did, he could settle in Cambridge. "If You wish I should go there," Fatio wrote, "I am ready to do so"—having, he added, other reasons for such a move than merely saving money. Newton took heart from that show of willingness, and accepted the news of Fatio's impending travels relatively calmly. "I must be content to want your good company, at least for some time," he said, taking his leave "wth all fidelity" until they could meet again.
There the exchange rested. The two traded a few letters about minor matters, a box of rulers Fatio had left behind, some books, and so on. Newton continued to press for a reunion in Cambridge, and Fatio continued to alternate suggestions that he might come to his friend with an always formidable propensity for self-absorption. (He wrote, for example, of his plan to undergo an operation for hemorrhoids, "to be free of an excrescence ... very troublesome to me.")
Then, abruptly, Fatio announced a change of plans. In May, five months after he first hinted that he might settle with or near Newton, he announced that he had made "new acquaintance ... a good and upright man." This new friend was another alchemist, an expert in the creation of mercury compounds. Fatio wrote that this adept could cure consumption with a potion "which he giveth for nothing." So, he assured Newton, there was no need to worry about his health anymore, for that good man would care for him without charge. "I have not now any need of money Sir, nor of your powders, but I thank you kindly for both."
Just in case Newton missed the point, Fatio wrote again of his new friend's marvelous remedy, announced his own plan to study medicine, so as to be able to sell the potion himself—and then had the boldness to suggest that Newton might want to partner with him in the enterprise. There was no mention of Cambridge, nor of rooms to be taken side by side, nor of the alchemical work that master and disciple could undertake. Fatio did allow that were Newton to come to London, he would be happy to see him. Failing such a meeting, he retained "all manner of respect" for the man to whom he had formerly pledged the whole of his heart.
To this, Newton had no reply. The next known document in his own hand is the one he abandoned on the question "Quid..." "What?"
Was Newton's heart broken? Maybe. Certainly, there is no parallel in the rest of his long life for the urgency he allowed himself to reveal in his letters to Fatio. His panic at the hint he might lose the object of that affection had no precedent either. Newton was more accustomed to dismissing men from his acquaintance than pursuing them.
Were Fatio and Newton lovers? No one knows. Probably not, if the rest of Newton's life is any guide. Except for his exchanges with Fatio himself—always written in the perfectly respectable terms with which men expressed affection then—there is nothing that can be seen as a love letter anywhere in his correspondence. The only more or less explicit traces of erotic longing Newton admitted throughout his life appear in his catalogue of sins as a young man. Along with lying about a louse to allowing his mind to wander during chapel to harboring murderous thoughts about his mother, he admits to "having uncleane thoughts words and actions and dreamses" and turning to "unlawful means to bring us out of distresses."
And that's it, just about all that connects Isaac Newton to sexual desire. His accounts contain no debits for bawdy houses, although they list several for taverns and drink. His letters mention nothing of physical need. His private papers add nothing to the image of a mostly sexless creature. Whether or not the living man who woke up alone each morning and laid his solitary self down at night felt any hunger for another's touch, man or woman, he seems never to have admitted as much—to himself or to anyone else.
In any event, the question of Newton's notional sex life misses the point. His letters to Fatio, and the younger, more beautiful man's replies, portray a clear and rather sad longing for some kind of intimacy—an emotional closeness, whether or not bodies were involved. For the short span of a year or two, Newton seems to have felt such a connection.
Fatio disappeared from view soon after he dismissed Newton. He eventually turned up at Woburn Abbey, tutoring the Duke of Bedford's children. He never regained his status as a rising star in European intellectual life. He never produced any original mathematics. Ultimately he became something of a pathetic figure, prone to religious manias and sponging cash from former friends—including Newton, whom he touched for thirty pounds in 1710.
But in the immediate aftermath of Fatio's flight, Newton suffered more. No one can now discover precisely why Newton broke down. He had some history of melancholy, from his childhood plaint ("I know not what to doe") to the prolonged periods in the 1670s during which he withdrew almost completely from public scrutiny. But the sequence of events is there. Newton's crisis followed directly on the collapse of his feelings for his friend. Put that together with his recognition of alchemical failure, and May and June of 1693 become scorched earth, the ruin of all hope. Fury, sorrow, silence—each of these are plausible reactions to such devastation, and Newton endured them all.
The summer passed. Newton gave no sign of noticing. September came, and he began to speak bitter, unhappy words—those blows flung almost at random against Pepys and Locke. Pepys did not respond, consciously choosing not to notice the disintegration of his great friend. Locke answered, hurt, but still declaring that "I truly love & esteem you &...I have the same good will for you as if noe thing of this had happened."
October turned, and Newton proceeded with the slow reorganization of his disordered mind. He apologized to Locke, and his friend forgave him. In November, Newton completed the letter he had abandoned in June. Finally, canny old Pepys reached out, with never a mention of any odd behavior on the part of his friend. Instead, he asked a technical question of great interest to gamblers: who had the best odds in a particular game of dice.
Newton understood the intent behind the message. He wrote back, "I was very glad ... to have any opportunity given me of shewing how ready I should be to serve you or your friends upon any occasion." He added that he wished he could perform some more important task, but nonetheless analyzed the issue at hand, explaining how Pepys should place his bets.
From there Newton's recovery strengthened. He resumed the company of his friends and worked closely with several younger colleagues, David Gregory and Edmond Halley especially. Fatio became a man he used to know. They did correspond infrequently—an exchange in 1707 centered on Fatio's enthusiasm for an apocalyptic religious revival being preached in London. But this was action at a distance. None of Newton's later letters to Fatio suggest a shred of pleasure in the other's company.
The winter of 1693 came, then passed. T
hrough the spring and summer of 1694, Newton concerned himself with this and that. He wrote a long memorandum on the proper education of boys. He dealt with nettlesome tenants on the land he had inherited from his mother. He made some notes on problems in calculus. He began what would be a years-long effort to come up with a complete explanation for the motion of the moon—the notorious "three-body problem" involving the interaction of the earth, sun, and moon.
The lunar calculations were good work, though Newton ultimately concluded (correctly) that he had failed to find a solution. He remained a brilliant mathematician. His skill was put to the test in 1697, when Johann Bernoulli published a pair of problems—a challenge that aimed at the most prominent mathematicians of the day. Newton received a copy of the second of the two on January 29, at four in the afternoon. By four the next morning, he had solved both. He sent Bernoulli his calculations unsigned. Bernoulli was undeceived, recognizing the mind behind the work "tanaquam ex ungue leonem — "as the lion is recognized by his print."
But good or great, such efforts were trivial compared with what Newton had achieved before. It is unfair to ask for two Principias from any man. He did still produce prodigious amounts of work, but increasingly his writing centered on history, biblical criticism, the analysis of ancient prophecy. His breakdown probably helped impel the shift in emphasis, but the simple fact is that time was passing. Very few creative scientists perform at the highest level for decades on end, and Newton had been at the leading edge of discovery since his early twenties. On Christmas Day, 1694, he turned fifty-one.
The year turned again. The academic calendar rolled on. Newton remained in residence at Trinity College, if not actually bored, then underemployed. There were whispers something might be coming his way, some plum post that would at last pry him loose from a university whose life absorbed him less and less. Nothing materialized, but in September 1695, an odd message arrived from London. It was a request on a matter completely outside his usual competence:
Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist Page 10
