118 JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY Judith P. Zinsser. La Dame d Esprit: A Biography of the Marquise Du Châtelet. New York: Viking, 2006. pp. 400. This is a personal and an intimate book: personal in that the author wishes to involve us in her choice of three possible scenarios for presenting the marquise Du Châtelet; intimate in that she introduces us immediately to the marquise s daily routine, the choses frivoles of her toilette, the members of her family, her visits to friends and to the opera, her hopes and fears for her future. An author might follow the standard biographies (4) and tell the marquise s story from the point of view of Voltaire, her lover for six or seven years in the 1730s. Her brilliance would then reflect the genius of the bourgeois playwright. (90) He undoubtedly taught her a lot, and his rich library, and network of connections to authors and booksellers, was a constant source of the latest information. Since an education in mathematics and science available to young men in the best colleges was closed to women, she had to rely on tutors, and she chose a succession of brilliant young (and not so young) experts. But try as a biographer might to free this outstanding young autodidact mathematician and physicist from the overpowering presence of the famous, egotistical Voltaire, he intrudes constantly, connecting her to the worldwide stage of the Enlightenment. Alternatively, a biographer might introduce us to those enchanted circles of salons and cafés where birth, wealth, wit, talent, and connections produced an enlightened elite, discussants of new thoughts in philosophy, economics, politics, science, medicine, and law. We would then meet the marquise in Lunéville, at the court of Lorraine, where she and her husband resided as guests of the duke, who appreciated her lively presence. Voltaire came to visit, and he and the marquise traveled to Cirey, her husband s estate in Champagne, which she managed expertly. With the marquis conveniently absent on military assignments, the marquise and Voltaire rebuilt and enlarged the chateau, and they occasionally conducted large-scale Dora B. Weiner, review of La Dame d Esprit: A Biography of the Marquise Du Châtelet, by Judith P. Zinsser, Journal of Historical Biography 5 (Spring 2009): 118-122, www.ufv.ca/jhb. Journal of Historical Biography 2009. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.
REVIEWS 119 experiments in physics. She began, at that time, to translate Newton s Principia into French. Somewhat later we find her back at Lunéville, pregnant with the child of Jean François de St. Lambert, while Voltaire brought his new mistress, his niece Marie Louise Denis. These casual but passionate sexual relationships evidently did not detract from everyone s constant and serious involvement in the life of the mind, especially in mathematics and physics. Lengthy residence at Lunéville and Cirey was enlivened by frequent visits of famous guests, often mathematicians or physicists who participated in the ongoing discussions about Newton s ideas and debates about Descartes versus Newton, specifically about the respective ideas of Newton and Leibniz regarding the calculus and forces vives (kinetic energy). The marquise seems to have held her own, even against Voltaire, a dedicated champion of Newton. The visitors to Lunéville included Francesco Algarotti, Claude Adrien Helvétius, and especially Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, who became the marquise s mathematics teacher after his return from his famous expedition to Lapland, and also her first lover. Beyond actual visits, there was constant involvement with the European network of intellectuals, les gens qui pensent, exchanges of manuscripts, of scientific objects, or of presents. We read of a package arriving from Paris with a reflecting telescope and a new pair of slippers for Voltaire. Frederick the Great sent wine (he was trying to woo Maupertuis to head the Berlin Academy of Sciences); Catherine the Great eventually bought Voltaire s whole library some seven thousand volumes which is now at St. Petersburg. How do we connect this kaleidoscope of relationships sometimes passionate, always filled with sparkling conversation to the marquise s thought and to her written work? Where was the anchor for her intellectual life? Zinsser is concerned about this question and offers a third biographic approach, one that goes beyond Voltaire and the ubiquitous buzz of intriguing conversation. In part three of her book, Zinsser takes us to the marquise s hôtel in Paris. There, we find the subject hard at work, refusing social distractions, feverishly attempting to complete her translation and commentary of Eléments de la philoso-
120 JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY phie de Newton, a collaborative undertaking with Voltaire that they returned to sporadically. Her first work, a free translation of portions of Bernard de Mandeville s Fable of the Bees, had also remained unfinished. She had laboured on Examens de la Bible, but her thoughts were so sacrilegious that she could not even envisage publication.(216) At the same time, disagreement with Voltaire, as well as costly and repeated experiments at Cirey, seem to have delayed publication of Dissertation sur la nature et la propagation du feu. She worked intermittently on her Discours sur le bonheur. She undoubtedly would have become better known had she not left most of her work unfinished. But she did persist in completing Institutions de physique, no doubt because it was a text destined for the guidance of her son. As soon as this work was published, she sent copies to King Frederick of Prussia, to Maupertuis, and to many of the most important philosophes, physiciens and géomètres of Europe s Republic of Letters. (191) Two unexpected responses raised the marquise to the level of acknowledged and respected scientific thinkers: the Journal des sçavants published a two-part positive review in its December 1740 issue and, even more conducive to notoriety, the recently elected permanent secretary of the Académie des sciences, Jean- Jacques Dortous de Mairan, attacked her defence of Leibniz s views on forces vives as erroneous. Just the fact of such a pamphlet, comments Zinsser, by such an opponent, brought validation that she, as a woman, never could have achieved purely by dint of her publications. (191) The marquise Du Châtelet responded in kind, quickly and effectively. In Zinsser s view, this recognition of the marquise by the official French intellectual world marks an important moment in the painfully slow ascent of women in the world of letters. Zinsser s two-page bibliography of the marquise Du Châtelet s writings (352-353) shows the many drafts, the post mortem editions, the collaborative work with Voltaire. Yet her seclusion in Paris, the feverish dedication to scholarship, came too late: she was now six months pregnant, gave birth early, and died a week later on 10 September 1749.
REVIEWS 121 The reader is left to decide which of the three approaches of this biographer is the most appealing: does Zinsser successfully evaluate the marquise s lifelong involvement with Voltaire? Does she see the salonnière of Lunéville and Cirey as the equal of a Madame du Deffand or a Mademoiselle de Lespinasse? Should we acknowledge the marquise as an author and philosophe in her own right? Zinsser demonstrates the value of all these approaches, and the three chronological parts of the book help us to follow the evolution of the marquise in all three contexts. However, a very important caveat needs to be added concerning the method of research and writing of this book. The most important sources of information are hundreds, probably thousands, of private letters. The author reminds us that in those days before the telegraph, the radio, or the telephone, everything was expressed in writing or in print. One sent written inquiries and comments to academicians, to royal officials, and to translators. One conveyed criticism, praise, or requests to editors, publishers, printers, and booksellers. One expressed feelings in correspondence with family, friends, and colleagues. One dispatched written orders, complaints, and payments to dressmakers and merchants. In published or manuscript collections of correspondence, in documents such as the mandatory Inventory after Death, thousands of small details are retrievable by a diligent biographer. And this author was indefatigable in her search. But how should a biographer use all these intimate small details? As an example of the challenge, Zinsser offers us one paragraph to describe what Cirey meant to the marquise, using quotations from twelve different collections of letters.(116-117, n. 28) Thus, her analysis is constantly interrupted by observations, reflections, asides, reservations, or commendations from outsiders closely connected to the marquise s social and mental world. These illustrations enrich the context, but interfere with the reader s focus on the author s argument. Zinsser describes her biography as a mapmaker s most thoughtful recreation of a woman who was unique. (287) She argues that a biographer must choose the features of the map that
122 JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY best portray a subject s convictions, inclinations or aversions, and psychological traits. In the end, the reader wonders whether Judith Zinsser herself was not hard pressed to give us her summary verdict about Madame Du Châtelet s personality and historic importance, and therefore coined the odd epithet dame d esprit, a phrase just as odd in French as might be its rough English equivalent lady of the mind. The author leaves us with the three possible approaches, but mainly with massive new evidence of what the Enlightenment was all about: intelligent and stimulating conversation and lasting or temporary friendships with physical relationships a normal extension of intimacy among a self-selected elite group of men and women who did not have to work for a living and who prized the life of the mind and the discussion of major ideas above all. The dame d esprit serves as a model. Dora B. Weiner University of California, Los Angeles