The Broken Seal

A vivid account of the dramatic fight between Voltaire, Émilie Du Châtelet, and Françoise de Graffigny—and how it offers surprising new insights about the wellsprings of the Enlightenment

In the winter of 1738–1739, three Enlightenment writers—Voltaire, the most celebrated author of his age; his lover Émilie Du Châtelet, a brilliant philosopher and mathematician; and Françoise de Graffigny, the most successful female novelist of the eighteenth century—found themselves uneasily sharing a country house at Cirey-sur-Blaise in Champagne. In a creative but volatile world of salons, scientific controversy, and literary innovation, where dangerous writings circulated in secret and reputations were precarious, the writers soon fell out on a grand scale. In The Broken Seal, acclaimed historian David Wootton vividly tells the story of this dramatic quarrel—and what it reveals about the surprising forces behind the calm facade of the Age of Reason.

The tensions at Cirey blew up on December 29th, 1738, when Du Châtelet, who had been secretly opening letters addressed to Voltaire and Graffigny, accused Graffigny of copying and sharing a portion of La Pucelle, Voltaire’s scandalous unpublished poem, risking its wider circulation and Voltaire’s arrest. The crisis proved to be a turning point for all three writers. In its aftermath, Voltaire moved toward the narrative voice that would culminate in Candide, Du Châtelet distanced herself intellectually from Voltaire, and Graffigny drew on the experience in her bestselling novel Letters of a Peruvian Woman.

An intimate account of how ideas are lived, The Broken Seal offers new insights into the birth of modern thought, the struggle for women’s intellectual freedom, the history of the novel, and the emotional lives behind reason and philosophy.