Passionate Minds

by David Bodanis

  Praise from the U.K. for

  PASSIONATE

  MINDS

  “Highly entertaining … and holds the most agreeable surprises…. A story well worth the retelling, and Bo danis tells it vividly.”

  —Sunday Times (London)

  “The tale is irresistible.”

  —Financial Times

  “Bodanis is good at explaining complex science and skillful in weaving together two unconventional, complex, and intellectually reforming lives…. David Bodanis has taken up one of the great stories of the period, a potent mix of romance, science, and history…. There is never a dull moment.”

  —Sunday Telegraph

  “Installs Emilie in the front row of the pantheon of Enlightenment natural philosophers.”

  —The Times (London)

  “This is an absorbing tale based on extensive research, and it takes full advantage of both heroes' propensity for coining quotable witticisms. Bodanis eloquently evokes women's restricted lives during the eighteenth century.”

  —The Guardian (U.K.)

  ALSO BY DAVID BODANIS

  The Body Book

  The Secret House

  Web of Words

  The Secret Garden

  The Secret Family

  E=mc2

  Electric Universe

  For Sophie

  A life to imagine

  Contents

  Preface

  Author's Note

  Prologue / CIREY, FRANCE, LATE JUNE 1749

  I. BEFORE

  1 • Emilie / PARIS AND VERSAILLES, 1706–1725

  2 • François / PARIS AND THE BASTILLE, 1717–1725

  3 • Young Woman / BURGUNDY AND PARIS, 1727–1731

  4 • Exile and Return / LONDON, 1726, TO PARIS, 1733

  II. MEETING

  5 • Meeting and Caution / PARIS, 1733–1734

  6 • Hunted / MONTJEU, PHILIPPSBURG, AND PARIS, 1734

  7 • Decision / CHâTEAU DE CIREY, AND PARIS, 1734–1735

  III. TOGETHER

  8 • Château de Cirey / CIREY, 1735+

  9 • Newton at Cirey / CHâTEAU DE CIREY, 1735–1736

  10 • Dutch Escape / CIREY AND THE LOW COUNTRIES, 1736–1737

  11 • Michelle / PARIS, LATE 1600S AND 1737

  IV. EMILIE'S CIREY

  12 • Voltaire's Fire / CIREY, MARCH–AUGUST 1737

  13 • Emilie's Fire / CIREY, AUGUST 1737–MAY 1738

  14 • New Starts / CIREY, 1738

  V. TRAVELS

  15 • Leibniz's World / BRUSSELS, 1739

  16 • New House, New King / PARIS, 1739

  17 • Frederick / FLANDERS AND PRUSSIA, 1740–1741

  VI. APART

  18 • The Wound in My Heart / PARIS AND VERSAILLES, MID-1740S

  19 • Recovery and Escape / PARIS, VERSAILLES, AND FONTAINEBLEAU, 1745–1747

  20 • To Sceaux / THE COURT, LATE 1670S; PARIS AND CHâTEAU DE SCEAUX, NOVEMBER 1747

  21 • Zadig / CHâTEAU DE SCEAUX, NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 1747

  VII. LUNEVILLE

  22 • The Court of Stanislas and Catherine / LUNéVILLE, 1748

  23 • Saint-Lambert / LUNéVILLE, 1748

  24 • Collapse / LUNéVILLE, 1748

  VIII. FINALE

  25 • Pregnancy / CIREY AND PARIS, CHRISTMAS EVE 1748–APRIL 1749

  26 • A Portal Unto the Stars / LINCOLNSHIRE, 1600S, AND FRANCE, 1749

  What Followed

  Notes

  Guide to Further Reading

  Acknowledgments

  Illustration Credits

  Preface

  Back at the end of the 1990s I was researching a book on Einstein when I came across a footnote about an obscure French woman of the early eighteenth century, Emilie du Châtelet. The note said she'd played a minor role in developing the modern concept of energy, then added that she had acquired a certain notoriety in her time.

  I was intrigued, and a few days later ended up at the science library of University College London—not in the modern, well-lit stacks upstairs, but deep in the darker ground-floor recesses, where the stacked journals had enough dust on them to reveal they hadn't been touched for years. What I discovered there—and then in other archives, as I tracked down her letters, as well as contemporary accounts of her life—astounded me. The footnote had understated her significance entirely. This woman had played a crucial role in the development of science—and had also had a wild life.

  She and the great writer Voltaire were lovers for nearly a decade, though they certainly took their time settling down, having to delay for frantic gallopings across France, sword fights in front of besieged German fortresses, a wild affair (hers) with a gallant pirate's son, and a deadly burning of books (his) by the public executioner at the base of the grand stairwell of the Palais de Justice in Paris. There was also rigging the French national lottery to guarantee a multimillion-franc payout, and investing in North African grain futures with the proceeds.

  Then, when she and Voltaire finally did commit to each other, things started getting more interesting. They'd decided to create a research institute, in an isolated château they'd rebuilt, that in many respects was a century or more ahead of its time. It was like a berthed laboratory from the future. Visitors from intellectual centers in Italy and Basle and Paris came to scoff, but they stayed, awed by what they saw. There are accounts of Emilie and Voltaire at breakfast, reading from the letters they received—from Bernoulli, and Frederick the Great; earlier there had been correspondence with Bolingbroke and Jonathan Swift—and in their quick teasing at what they heard, they'd come up with fresh ideas, then return to their separate wings of the house and compete to elaborate them.

  When they ran out of money, Emilie would sometimes resort to the gambling tables at Versailles—since she was so much quicker than anyone else at mathematics, she could often be counted on to win. Voltaire wrote proudly that “the court ladies, playing cards with her in the company of the queen, were far from suspecting that they were sitting next to Newton's commentator.”

  Voltaire wasn't much of a scientist, but Emilie was a skilled theoretician. Once, working secretly at night at the château over a single intense summer month, hushing the servants not to spoil the surprise for Voltaire, she came up with insights on the nature of light that set the stage for the future discovery of photography, as well as of infrared radiation. Her later work was even more fundamental, for she played a key role in transforming Newton's thought for the modern era. The research she did on what later became termed the conservation of energy was crucial here, and the “squared” in Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 came, in fact, directly from her work.

  In the evening of ordinary days, when she and Voltaire did take a break from their separate research, there were candles everywhere, and Emilie raced in conversation, eyes sparkling, faster than anyone Voltaire had ever met. He adored her youth and intelligence (she was twenty-seven when they met), and she teased him for that; but she was thankful, deeply, that she'd finally found someone with whom she could let her intelligence pour forth. She'd been raised in a world where women weren't educated to any serious level, and she had been too unsure of herself to make these efforts on her own (even though no one who saw her confidence as an adult would have guessed how self-doubting she'd been).

  Each of them transformed the other. Before meeting Emilie, Voltaire had been a respected wit, but little of his earlier output would be considered important today. Yet he loved Emilie beyond measure:

  …why did you only reach me so late?

  What happened to my life before?

  I'd hunted for love, but found only mirages.

  She led him through Newton's great works, and that became the great shift in Voltaire's career, as h
e 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.

  I was excited by these first glimpses I was getting. But after collating my notes just enough to write a handful of pages on this couple for my book E=mc2 I was pulled away to other projects. Only in 2003 was I free to get back full time to their story. The wait was worth it, for by then I realized that there was something even more than a love story here. I'd taught intellectual history at Oxford, and knew that many people had contributed to the giant shift in eighteenth-century attitudes known as the Enlightenment.

  But I hadn't realized how much du Châtelet and Voltaire's love affair was at the Enlightenment's very heart. The eighteenth century's leading man of reason had been bested by a woman intellectually superior to him, and it had led to their helping shape this powerful, world- shifting movement.

  That was the wider story. To make it come alive meant starting inside the early eighteenth century, which even in France, the most advanced country in Europe, would seem deeply bizarre to us if we were sent there now. Women could be whipped and beaten by their husbands, with no recourse in law; homosexuals were liable to be publicly burned or, as in the case of one terrified homosexual abbé who was rescued at the last minute by Voltaire's intervention, preparations would be made to have their bodies pulled apart by iron hooks before they were sent to those salutary public flames.

  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, then his children could usually—and quite legally—be exempted from having to pay those taxes either. Or their 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 engaging in this scorned activity of paid work.

  It also was 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.

  Voltaire and du Châtelet weren't the first to react against that. Cracks had already begun opening in the old view: from the evidence European explorers found of how different civilizations chose to live; from exhaustion after the continent's religious wars; from the extraordinary corruption of courtly life; from new ideas of the scientific revolution. But du Châtelet and Voltaire went further than most, partly from their sheer intelligence, but also because their unconventional life disproved the standard views. How could anyone believe that women really should have no true rights, or be kept out of education, when du Châtelet's strong, independent actions undercut that bias every day?

  Most of the thinkers who began seeing the flaws in the old regime weren't organized at first. They were too isolated to build up any power. That's where the cascade of letters and texts that poured out from Emilie and Voltaire's château was so important. They galvanized such then unknown young men as Helvétius, d'Alembert, and Diderot, whose writings and edited volumes spread Enlightenment ideas even more widely.

  It was pretty clear that I was going to have to write a full book: a biography not just of du Châtelet, but of Voltaire wherever he overlapped with her, and their links with wider trends as well. Although I'd concentrate on France, because of its place at the center of the civilized world, I realized I couldn't help at least touching on how 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.

  The research was a delight. Du Châtelet had been an inveterate letter writer, sometimes sending four or five messages a day, and Voltaire wrote constantly too, so what I found about key events was often as dense as an e-mail trail today. Thousands of those letters have survived, as have du Châtelet's own half-dozen books and unprinted manuscripts (including beautiful, private autobiographical reflections). There also are letters from houseguests and neighbors and purchasing agents and scientists, as well as a vast thicket of police reports, complemented by a small layering of servants' memoirs.

  The detail was so great that when, for example, I describe Voltaire smiling after being asked a question by a particular police spy in May 1717, his smiling is not a random guess, but appears in a report the spy wrote that very evening. If du Châtelet looks out of a window, it's something mentioned in letters, or impossible to avoid by the layout of the room she's in—through the kindness of the present owners of the château where she and Voltaire lived, I was able to track their daily patterns, and spend time banging on walls, as well as examining door hinges and stairwell foundations and layers of wall paint, to work out what their living space had been like at the time.

  Whenever the story seemed to slow, my characters would help me. Since Voltaire and Emilie often got restless after a few months at the château—or the government would draw up arrest warrants again— their shared decade wasn't just one of quiet reading and conversation. There were border escapes and Versailles card cheats; Paris throngs, and torn passion with the man who inspired the heartlessly sexy aristocrat Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses (“… and if you are still interested,” du Châtelet wrote him one delicate time, “oh felix culpa”). There's a carriage overturning in deep snowdrifts at night, even an expedition through the frozen wastes of northern Lapland, in search of the truth about God's plans for the universe in the cold of Earth's Arctic latitudes.

  There was so much material that the eavesdropping almost got too vivid. I found du Châtelet's account of how she would binge-eat when she was depressed, then make herself quickly stop before any of her friends could tell she'd gained weight; there's Voltaire mulling over the sexual exhaustion of his “little machine,” and then reporting with satisfaction when it was back in order.

  One of the most painful parts in my writing came when I reached the moment where the idyll started crashing apart. It was like watching friends you've loved destroying themselves in a divorce. Voltaire and Emilie had always had sudden quarrels, but those were usually patched up by an afternoon in the bedroom and then, if they were at the château and the weather was good, a picnic nearby, for which they'd bring wine, food, and—to new visitors' puzzlement—an extra crate with books, writing paper, quills, and ink. But in time these resolutions came further and further apart.

  Voltaire fell out of love first. Emilie knew she should still be able to have a satisfying life, and at one point wrote how ridiculous it was to think that an intelligent woman really needed a man to be happy. Yet she did need that warmth, and the main text shows the resultant catastrophe that led to her sudden death in her early forties.

  Voltaire was devastated (“I have lost the greatest part of myself ”), and if there's a bitterness, an angry bite to his satires after that, it's largely due to this awful injustice at the end. 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.

  WHY isn't the story better known? Almost immediately after Emilie's death, sharp-tongued gossips began to disparage what she'd done. Since her main work was so technical, the women who ran Paris's salons had had no way of understanding its importance. Then, when her insights did enter the scientific mainstream, the idea that a woman had created these thoughts was considered so odd that the male researchers who used her ideas came to forget who had originated them. Voltaire did what he could, but even before his own death memory o
f her was being lost. By the end of the eighteenth 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 nineteenth century, all but the briefest references to her name were gone.

  Now is a good time to bring her back. A number of eighteenth- century women have been written about recently, but usually just because they had affairs with notable men or married into wealthy or important families. Du Châtelet's achievement is on an entirely different level.

  Recent historical styles help. For a long time the chief Enlightenment thinkers were treated as a unified group, nobly striving for the betterment of all mankind, either as divinely inspired sages or as representatives of an inevitably rising new class. Much of that was a fantasy of French historians, projecting onto the past one side of the harsh, ongoing nineteenth-century battles left over from the French Revolution.

  Conservative thinkers reacted against that, with their views reaching a head as the communist and fascist regimes of the early and mid- twentieth century showed the ways that insistent, misguided ideas could produce great evil. A gentler critique came from the American academic Carl Becker, who concentrated on the way many Enlightenment thinkers seemed just to be transposing the religious ideals they'd been brought up with, even in their recommendations about ostensibly secular policies. As Simone Weil put it in a different context, it was as if they believed one could get to heaven simply by marching straight ahead.

  Yet that naiveté also was an exaggeration. One of the most important correctives in the immediate postwar years came from Peter Gay, then a young German refugee, working at Columbia University in New York. Among other things he pointed out the absurdity of holding that Voltaire ever believed in the infinite malleability of mankind, given that Voltaire put individuals driven by illogical emotion at the center of so much of his work.