Emilie Du Chatelet
Daring Genius of the Enlightenment
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Publisher Description
The captivating biography of the French aristocrat who balanced the demands of her society with passionate affairs of the heart and a brilliant life of the mind
Although today she is best known for her fifteen-year liaison with Voltaire, Gabrielle Emilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise Du Châtelet (1706-1749) was more than a great man's mistress. After marrying a marquis at the age of eighteen, she proceeded to fulfill the prescribed-and delightfully frivolous-role of a French noblewoman of her time. But she also challenged it, conducting a highly visible affair with a commoner, writing philosophical works, and translating Newton's Principia while pregnant by a younger lover. With the sweep of Galileo's Daughter, Emilie Du Châtelet captures the charm, glamour, and brilliance of this magnetic woman.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 300th birthday of the 18th-century French noblewoman, scientist, freethinker (she considered Jesus "a pious fraud") and paramour of Voltaire brings the second new biography. David Bodanis's Passionate Minds presents her life essentially as a romance novel. Historian Zinsser (A History of Their Own) says more about her subject's scientific work, which groped toward a modern conception of kinetic energy and included an influential recasting of Newton's work on the calculus. Du Ch telet (1706-1749) was certainly an emblematic, if not quite pivotal, figure in the ferment of 18th-century European science and philosophy, and her works could ground an illuminating and accessible intellectual history of the age, but they demand a more systematic treatment than Zinsser gives them. She has a surer footing on social and cultural history, as she surveys the ancien r gime's caste system and court protocol at Versailles and regales readers with details of du Ch telet's luxurious wardrobe and household furnishings, as well as her struggle for acceptance by the male scientific establishment. All this makes for an enjoyable study of an unusual woman and feminist pioneer, but du Ch telet still awaits a biography that does full justice to her ideas. Photos.
