Judith P. Zinsser - Emilie du Châtelet, Daring Genius Of The Enlightenment (Penguin, 2006)

In my Voltaire year, I also read this fascinating biography of an even more fascinating woman, Emilie du Châtelet, an 18th Century mathematician and scientist who was the mistress of Voltaire for many years. She was of very high nobility, yet never really fit in. She was more interested in science and mathematics than in the shallow life at the salons of the King and Queen. After her third child was born, she moved to the castle of Cirey in the Champagne region where she lived with Voltaire, and with the blessing of her husband. Together, they translated Newton into French, wrote books about physics, the nature of fire.

They organise evenings at the castle for other influential thinkers. Du Châtelet fought her entire life against the prejudices of the male world against women, and showed both by her knowledge, her insights and her character that the actual opposite was true.

Maybe a little less known, is her influence of the scientific approach, and the strong importance she gave to the role of hypotheses as the foundation of building up evidence and counter-evidence. Despite her great interest and admiration for people like Newton and Leibniz, she still challenged some of their thoughts and argued against some of their conclusions.

For her and for Voltaire the entire world was opening up. Stories about new territories, other cultures, about the forces of the universe, about the orbits of planets, about the possibilities of the microscope and even the invention of inoculation of children to prevent diseases created a new world of vast opportunities that suddenly broke the narrow and oppressive confines of religion and state.

Both she and Voltaire did everything they could to open this new found crack in this narrow world as wide as possible. Du Chatelet also published a book on happiness, including some for that time shocking disclosures on the importance of pleasure, and a book enumerating all the completely irrational things in the Bible, demonstrating that scripture is made by men, and then men with limited possibilities of coherence and logic.

Zinsser's book gives a wonderful description of the complexities of this budding of rationality in a still very obscure society.