The French Luminary’s Woman
By CAROLINE WEBER
LA DAME D’ESPRIT A Biography of the Marquise Du Châtelet by Judith P. Zinsser, Illustrated. 376 pp. Viking. $24.95.
Can
we women have it all? A professor of mine once told me that trying to have
both a career and a love life was a recipe for disaster. Coming from a woman
whose accomplishments I admired, the remark haunted me for a long time. If
only she had steered me instead toward the Marquise Du Châtelet, whose
inspiring example Judith P. Zinsser sets forth in “La Dame d’Esprit,” the
story of an 18th-century French noblewoman who, undaunted by the prejudices
of her era, “saw no contradictions” in pursuing both a life of the heart and
a life of the mind.As befitted a lady of her standing, Gabrielle Emilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise Du Châtelet (1706-1749), devoted herself tirelessly to the management of her household and family estates, and to the cultivation of the important contacts needed for her husband’s and children’s social advancement. These activities did not, however, prevent the marquise from finding satisfactions outside the domestic sphere. Declaring that she wanted solely to “depend on my tastes and my pleasures,” she embarked on a series of passionate extramarital affairs, including a long involvement with Voltaire (for which she is chiefly remembered). More unconventionally still, she “astonished” even the iconoclastic Voltaire when she wholeheartedly embraced the study of math and science.
Voltaire, Zinsser notes, wrote about her “both appreciatively and deprecatingly.” Quite often he praised her remarkable intellectual energies, which, he declared, qualified her as a “great man.” Indeed, theirs was a partnership as fully productive as those that linked many of the “great men” in the 18th century’s Republic of Letters. Voltaire enlisted the marquise’s help. She “read, translated, wrote précis of books she researched for him, critiqued and edited his prose, plays and verse.” And he assisted her in the scientific studies she preferred to literature, and in which she far outshone him. “Truthfully,” he confessed to a friend, “Madame Du Châtelet is a prodigy.”
Nonetheless, Voltaire could not resist the occasional joke at Du Châtelet’s expense. Belittling her devotion to physics (her ambitious translation of Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” remains, to this day, the only complete French edition), he nicknamed her “Mme Neuton Pompom.” He responded to her taking a new lover with “subtle mockery,” advising Jean-François de Saint-Lambert, the young poet with whom Du Châtelet became involved after Voltaire began an affair with his own niece, to take Du Châtelet “quickly to her toilette,” rid her of her “old black apron” and cleanse “her hand dirty with ink.” Only in abandoning her studies, the philosophe suggested, could the marquise hope to “reclaim all her charms” and obtain the love for which she was intended.
According to Zinsser, such “fanciful and subtly demeaning images” have distorted history’s verdict on Du Châtelet’s intellectual achievements, which were formidable by any standard. As a woman, Du Châtelet was deprived “by custom” of the formal collège (secondary school) education granted her male peers. (This privation later prompted her to declare: “If I were king, I would establish collèges for women.”) Undeterred, the marquise sought independent instruction from some of Paris’s most prominent scholars. In 1733, at 26, “she began lessons in advanced geometry and algebra.”
Over the next 16 years, working obsessively right up to her death from a pulmonary embolism in 1749, she became a respected authority in both these fields, and in physics and integral calculus as well. She translated Mandeville and Newton, was the first woman published by the Académie Royale des Sciences and was elected to a similar academy in Bologna. She also wrote a complex synthesis of Descartes, Newton and Leibniz that “formulated a ‘unified theory’... for the workings of nature.” All the while, she somehow managed to look after her children, please her husband and keep her lovers happy. This balancing act forced her to do much of her own work from midnight till 5 in the morning. Though she confessed to Saint-Lambert that her regimen “required a mind and body of iron,” it enabled her to fulfill the ambition that she experienced as “a frightening need.” And she never questioned her right to satisfy this need, even if she had occasionally to beg her loved ones “not to ‘reproach me for my Newton.’ ”
Today’s women will find much that is familiar in Du Châtelet’s multitasking lifestyle, which Zinsser, who teaches history at Miami University in Ohio and is an expert in women’s history, describes with understandable and infectious appreciation. The author’s prose, though, is riddled with tiresome repetitions. In her book’s opening pages, she calls Du Châtelet a “brilliant, unorthodox woman,” whose “unorthodox predicament” it was to harbor “unorthodox aspirations” and lead an “unorthodox life.” Subsequent chapters detail the “unorthodox and extraordinary” marquise’s “unorthodox” choices, her “unorthodox” decisions and her “unorthodox course of study.” In her conclusion, Zinsser reiterates that “Du Châtelet’s unorthodox intellectual pursuits” made for a highly “unorthodox life.”
Still, Zinsser’s characterization of Du Châtelet is impossible to dispute, and easy to admire. The marquise herself recognized that she was ahead of her time, and expressed the hope that she would win “the applause of posterity ... from which one expects more justice than from one’s contemporaries.” Readers of “La Dame d’Esprit” will surely grant her wish.
Caroline Weber, an associate professor of French at Barnard College and the author of “Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution,” is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.