Passionate Minds: The Great Love Affair of the Enlightenment, Featuring the Scientist Emilie Du Chatelet, the Poet Voltaire, Sword Fight [Hardcover]

After reading David Bodanis' previous work, E=mc2: A History of the World's Most Famous Equation , I was hooked on this author's way of presenting science and research that was neither boring nor pendantic. Instead, he takes the time to explain how a particular idea or discovery relates to the modern reader, and presents researchers not just as dodgy old coots in laboratories muttering in arcane languages.

Instead, Passionate Minds takes a very different route. It begins with a child, a little girl, who grew up in the Paris of Louis XV, a time when women were expected to be not much more than brood mares and ornamental objects. But Emilie was very different. For one thing, she was clever, with a mind that could grasp not just the social niceties of the day -- that of being able to make conversation and turn a witty phrase -- but also understand mathematics and the beginings of modern science, and a particular love of astronomy. To say taht Emilie was unusual for her time is an understatement. Her father adored her, and did everything he could to encourage her studies. Her mother, on the other hand, wasn't too pleased by the intellectual leanings of her daughter's mind, wishing that she would instead be a bit more interested in fashion and young men. Emilie does marry, to a wealthy aristocrat, and it's after here that the story takes on an interesting twist.

Today, most marriages are regarded as romantic attachments, but in the eighteenth century, you married more as a business arrangement. A couple married for financial security, or for social status, and Emilie was lucky enough to get both in her husband. She became Madame la Marquise du Chatellet, and after presenting her husband with two children, she embarked on a series of affairs. Adultery, while certainly a sin, was acceptable among the aristocracy so long as decency and discretion was maintained -- it was incorrect to visit both your wife and your mistress when they were in the same town, for example. And Emilie was just as unusual with her lovers as she was with her studies -- one would become the model for Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the one who would make the greatest change in her life was the writer known as Voltaire.

Voltaire, best known for his play Candide, was a bit of a troublemaker. His Letters from England were publically burned, and he was no stranger to exile either. And when he and Emilie met, they recognized in each other kindred spirits. Voltaire was charming, had made a fortune in wheat speculation, and even became good friends with Emilie's husband. Together they would refurbish a chateau in the countryside that would become a center for learning and scientific exploration, and able to encourage each other in their work, along with maintaining a physical relationship.

But when Emilie's work managed to receive more acclaim than Voltaire's, the relationship had a rift. And stung, Emilie turned to her one consolation -- Newtonian physics -- and began the work that would gain her the most recognition.

How the rest of the story plays out is what makes this one so interesting. Emilie managed to stay friends with Voltaire, even if the sexual aspects of their relationship had ended. Bodanis manages to hit the high points of each person's life, arranging it more or less in chronological order, and takes the time to digress now and then to explain how a social situation or discovery for a modern reader, and presents everything in a tidy, fairly coherent whole. There's plenty of scandal and humor in here, some of it rather tongue-in-cheek, and plenty to whet the reader's appetite for more.

I found myself wanting to know more about Emilie and Voltaire and Bodanis kindly supplies not just notes with that have suggested reading, but also an extensive bibliography. An insert of black and white photos is supplied as well, which help to give a face to many of the names and places. The narrative itself moves along quite briskly, and keeps explainations and digressions to a minimum, and never gets bogged down in the details.

For anyone who is interested in the birth of the Enlightenment, the role of women in a very male society, or wonders how scientific research got going, I would happily suggest this book. It's geared for the general reader, and makes a grand introduction to history in a very appealling way. Don't miss this one!

There is to be a new biography of Emilie published later on this year, by Judith Zinsser called La Dame d'Esprit: A Biography of the Marquise du Chatelet

It is difficult enough to write engagingly about someone who died over two hundred years ago; David Bodanis has written an excellent history not merely of one interesting person but of two: Emilie du Chatelet and her sometime lover Voltaire. In a narrative spanning (in detail) nearly two decades, in which Voltaire's fortunes rose, sank, rose, sank, and rose again and in which Emilie herself underwent tribulations both common (failed love affairs) and uncommon (struggling to create a place for herself amongst the first rank of European thinkers), Bodanis succeeds admirably in engaging our interest and sympathy.

Most readers are unlikely to be familiar with the oppressive manners peculiar to the Courts of Louis XIV and his even more amazingly doltish son Louis XV; Bodanis gives us what we need to know in order to make sense of the maze through which Voltaire so frequently stumbled and through which the much more quick-witted Emilie navigated with efficiency.

Likewise we are given enough context to follow the twists and turns of these twinned lives, without feeling either that Bodanis is patronising us or providing unnecessary embellishments. It's a tour-de-force of delicate writing that allows the reader to sail along on the current of Bodanis' painstakingly assembled knowledge, all the while growing deeper in our attachment to the two central characters. This is the more remarkable in that Bodanis shelters us only a little from their failings. Voltaire is shown as vainglorious and weak; Emilie can be glimpsed as being rather too intense for most mortals to cope with. Yet together they made sense of the world and of each other, and the reader feels genuine pity and sadness as their relationship gradually changes. The fiery intensity of their first love, combining as it did intellectual fireworks with physical glories, fades to the embers of mutual affection and understanding. Perhaps the finest testament to Bodanis' skill as a narrator is the fact that Emilie's premature death from childbirth, when it comes, is deeply moving. At that moment, something wonderful was taken from the world and Bodanis' skill lies in making us feel that loss even after the passage of two and a half centuries.

Bodanis' touch is sure and slips only twice, on small technical matters. The exposition on Liebenitz' method to solve the problem of curvature is probably more confusing than helpful, and would be easier to understand in the normal language of calculus. And when Emilie cleverly purchases, for a lump sum, the rights to future tax revenues this is described as the first instance of derivatives trading whereas in fact it's an example of using net present value (of a future income stream) to determine the correct present price of an asset (or in this case, a lower-than-correct price, to ensure that the nimble Emilie can make a handsome profit from the intellectually indolent aristocrats who owned the rights to tax the French populace). But these are tiny cavils and in no way detract from this marvelous little book.

For anyone curious about Voltaire (the man who brought us Micromegas and Candide), the birth of the Enlightenment, and the extraordinary person that was Emilie du Chatalet, this is a book that must be read for both pleasure and education.

Emilie du Chatelet was a most interesting women for her time, or for any time. A member of the French aristocracy she was adored by her father and taught unwomanly things like sword fighting, riding, languages, literature and mathematics. She also liked to dance, was a passable performer on the harpsichord, sang opera, and was an amateur actress.

As a scientist she is remembered as a footnote, if you will, to the other scientists of the day. She did research into fire, and developed theories of what is now called infra-red radiation. In the year of her death she completed the work regarded as her outstanding achievement: her translation into French, with her own commentary, of Newton's celebrated Principia Mathematica, including her derivation from its principles of mechanics the notion of conservation of energy.

She also led a life we would consider somewhat scandalous. After dutifully presenting her husband with the children expected of an arranged marriage they agreed to live apart with each taking other lovers.

I was struck with the fact that she died in 1749. Had she been born fifty years later, it is likely that she would have faced the guillotine like so many others.