Born into an aristocracy which expected its women to be witty and clever, as a child, Emilie de Breteuil showed every indication that she would never grow up to have the most important qualification of a woman of her age, beauty. Consequently, to prepare her for a life of seclusion as a spinster, her father provided her with the best education possible. By age ten, she had read Cicero and had studied mathematics and metaphysics. By twelve she could speak English, Italian, German, and Spanish and had translated Greek and Latin texts by Aristotle and Virgil. To everyone's amazement, the tall, gangly child grew up to be an attractive, intelligent, out-spoken woman. Her introduction at court was a success. Flambouyant, in 1733 after being barred from the coffee house the Cafe Gradot where scientists, mathematians, and philosophers met because she was a woman, Chatelet had a suit of men's clothes made and reappeared dressed in breeches and hose, much to the delight of the men and the consternation of the management. Determined to control her own life, she searched for the man of her dreams - someone who was rich, who was much older than herself, and who would be away from home as much as possible. She found her ideal match in the Marquis Florent-Claude du Chatelet-Lomont who owned several large estates and had a passion for war. They had nothing in common.

      While her 2 children were raised by nurses and governesses and her husband was off to war, Emilie partied away the nights, often with her lovers, and followed her scholarly pursuits during the day. Her wealth and social position enabled her to hire some of the greatest eighteenth-century scientists as her mathematics and science tutors including Pierre Louis de Maupertuis and Alexis-Claude Clairaut, at the time, probably the only Newtonians in the French Academy. As her study of Newton deepened, Emilie gradually rejected the teachings of Descartes and adopted the ideas of Newton and Leibnitz, the two men who independently and almost simultaneously developed the mathematics of calculus.

      Soon after reestablishing a childhood acquanitance with Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire (1694-1778), the first of the great French Enlightenment Philosophes, in 1733, they became lovers. Voltaire was forced once again into exile and the lovers settled at Cirey, a run-down thirteenth century estate owned by Emilie's husband. They had the house renovated, bringing in a large library, and transforming an entry hall into a scientific laboratory, much to her husband's delight - he had an estate restored and maintained at Voltaire's expense. He only required that they build him a game reserve.

      Cirey became one of the leading centers of French intellectual life and certainly the center of Newtonian science: they were in contact with Newtonians throughout Europe. Newton believed in a rational world which was ruled by mathematical and physical laws. To mathematically describe one of the properties of the natural world, gravity, on objects in the universe, Newton developed integral and differential calculus, posited his laws of gravitation, and studied the nature of light. To be a Newtonian then was to embrace the idea of a rational world ruled by natural laws, laws which could be deduced from experiments and observations, and to reject the proposition that the world was ruled by the whims of supernatural beings and otherwise unexplainable forces. Newtonian physics required knowledge of advanced mathematics to develop a quantifiable theory of the natural world, a theory which could be tested by experiment. Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), a blend of his metaphysical theory of the natural world, geometry, calculus, optics, and orbital mechanics is a difficult book to read and understand, even after it has been translated into English, even when there are plenty of people around who can explain some of the more difficult passages. So to understand Newtonian physics, mathematics, and metaphysics in the 1730s when the only available texts of it were in Latin and there were few people to explain the more difficult passages was quite an accomplishment.

      In the Introduction to his 1738 Elements de la philosophie de Newton Voltaire claimed that Emilie had been his guide. Not satisfied with this contribution to the Newtonian - Cartesian debate, Emilie wrote her 'Lettre sur les elements de la philosophie de Newton', a review and defense of Newton's theory, which appeared in the September 1738 issue of Journal de scavans. She would spend the rest of her life trying to convert the French Academy to the ideas of Newton. Although she published papers on a variety of topics in the intervening years, by 1745, Madame de Chatelet was working almost exclusively on a French translation of Principia which included extensive explanatory notes on the metaphysics, physics, and mathematical principles found in the work, greatly simplifying the work. In 1749, not expecting to survive her pregnancy, de Chatelet was determined to finish her work on Newton. Working feverishly until the moment of her daughter's birth, Chatelet retired to her bed to recover from the labor. She died a few days later. Voltaire took the manuscript and had it published at his own expense, making the work intellectually accessible to a larger number of people and enabling the Newtonian scientific method to become an integral part of the French Enlightenment. Her translation remains to this day the only translation of Principia into French.

      Emilie du Chatelet had a profound and enduring influence on both French scientific thought and the metaphysics of the great 18th century French Enlightenment Philosophes Volatire, Denis Diderot (1713-1784), Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), Claude Adrian Helvetius (1715-1771), Jean Le Rond d'Alembeert (1723-1783), Paul Henry Dietrich, Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789), and Anne Robert Jacques, Baron Turgot (1727-1781), men who have collectively had a profound effect on the course of western civilization.

Reference:

      Alic, Margaret, Hypatia's Heritage: A History of Women in Science from Antiquity throguh the Nineteenth Century, Beacon Press, Boston.

      Anderson, Bonnie and Judith Zinsser, A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present, vol 2, Harper Perennial, 1988, pp 88-90

      Ira O. Wade, Voltair and Madame du Chatelet. An essay on the intellectual activity at Cirey, Princeton UP, 1941.

      Voltaire

      Voltaire

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