David Bodanis - Passionate Minds

	Passionate Minds
	Purchase this book from Amazon UK US www.meettheauthor.com 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. - The Sunday Telegraph ...highly entertaining...and holds the most agreeable surprises...Bodanis tells [the story] vividly. - The (London) Sunday Times
	Once Emilie du Châtelet settled with Voltaire, the two of them rebuilt an isolated chateau to create an extraordinary research center. It became like a berthed spacecraft from the future, and it was there that she began her greatest scientic work. Visitors came to scoff, but then stayed, and became awed by what they saw. (The most voluble of these guests, Mme de Graffigny, wrote many pages of gossipy letters while she was there.) But even more than their scientific work, the poems and love letters that Emilie and Voltaire wrote are the ideal way to trace their entwined lives.



	Shortly after Emilie and Voltaire met - in 1733 - he wrote the following to her (and, alas, everything he predicted came true):

	They'd met when a couple who were friends of Emilie brought her over to meet Voltaire: ... The four of them rode to an inn outside the city walls, they had chicken cooked in wine, there were candles everywhere, and Emilie raced in conversation, faster than anyone Voltaire had ever met, eyes sparkling as she teased and leapt against his words. This was special. He’d never even had a male friend like this, so what kind God had created this delightful woman, still just 27? Voltaire kept it a secret at first. To the mutual friend who’d brought Emilie, he merely wrote a polite thank you for the evening. But he and Emilie had become lovers almost immediately, and just a few weeks later he wrote a poem for Emilie, telling what he now felt:

	A lot happened the year they met. Emilie and Voltaire had a great relation, but he was a hypochondriac, and oh could he kvetch. When he started going on about his health - and he found out that, as he put it, his little machine wasn't working properly - she pretty much left him, and took up with a dishy pirate's son (who was also a top mathematician). The pirate's son was named maupertuis. After a few months voltaire felt better. ... If Emilie had met Maupertuis at any other time in her life, she might have easily decided to stay with him. But by February 1734, Voltaire was feeling better, and started his counterattack. He knew that Maupertuis was brighter and a better scientist than him, but he wrote a poem for Emilie to still try to get her back

	Yet did Voltaire really understand her better? She wasn’t sure. By late February she was seeing both men - Voltaire’s little machine was pretty much in order - but that couldn’t go on forever (and then I describe her decision...) Many many chapters later, after she and Voltaire had pretty much broken up (or seemed to), he wrote her, explaining that he was too old to have sex. (it wasn't quite true, for he was having an affair with someone else by then; but what he expressed about a continued friendship was true):

	Then, a few years after her main problems with voltaire, in 1748 she met a handsome young poet named st. Lambert. She was around 42; he was 27. In the court where they met they couldn't be seen speaking to each other at first, and so they left notes for each other in a harp that was in the main hall. It was only used for occasional concerts, but it was so attractive that it was fine for visitors to pause in front of it, as if examining the woodwork or strings. That's where she and st. Lambert left their first notes. All of his are lost, but dozens of Emilie's survive, half-crumbled around the edges, and yellowed from the two centuries that have passed:

	A few years earlier, in a manuscript titled 'Happiness' that she'd worked on when everything was falling apart with Voltaire, she'd written, with calm logic, that it was ridiculous to think that an intelligent woman needed a man to be happy; that even if there were pleasures such a relation could bring, no one who'd become old - she gave the age of 30 as the cut-off - could feel them with the full intensity of the young. But that had been written before St. Lambert - and he was the most devoted of lovers. He described waking in the morning:

	It didn't last with st. Lambert. For various reasons he began shunning her, and it was horrible. ...She tried friendly cajoling at first:

	And then, just fragments:

	Then, to make it even worse, she got pregnant, and was pretty sure that at her age she wouldn't survive the labor. She'd almost finished the manuscript which was her life's work in science (and which was fundamental to our later understanding of the conversation of energy). The prologue to the book showed her at this stage in her life, trying to finish the book in time; now, at the v. End of the book, i have her finishing it. The following are the last paragraphs in the book, and then there's a two paragraph epilog: ...her to be one of the fortunate ones? Sometimes the uncertainty was too much ('I'm terrified when I think my premonitions might be true'). But she continued her intense writing schedule, and did manage to finish the manuscript, on August 30th. She wrote to the director of the King's Library that her pages were on the way; 'It would be most kind to...have them registered so that they can't get lost. Mr. de Voltaire, who is here beside me sends you his tenderest compliments' In her final letter, August 31st, 1749 she was tired, but still had hope:

	Emilie du Chatelet gave birth on the night of September 3rd. She died of complications from the labor on September 10th; the child - an unnamed girl - died soon after. Her translation and commentary on Newton's Principia became fundamental to all 18th century developments in theoretical physics. Voltaire was bereft: 'I've lost the half of myself - a soul for which mine was made' Months later, having abandoned Cirey and moved back to Paris, his servant would find him wandering at night in the apartments he'd shared with Emilie, plantively calling her name in the dark. The chateu where she and voltaire had lived together in happiness for many years was called 'cirey'. On a page on its own at the v. end of the book, we have:

	This biography installs Émilie in the front row of the pantheon of Enlightenment natural philosophers. - The (London) Times What we have here is a truly great story, told with the sincerity, exuberance and affection it deserves. - The Independent on Sunday