February 3, 2021 • 39 mins
Du Châtelet challenged the philosophic and scientific world of her time, but she's often eclipsed by her far more famous lover.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Oh, Tracy,
We're finally getting to the topic that's been on my
list forever, ye forever enough that there have been several
(00:24):
times in the last couple of months where You're like,
is this the week you're doing that thing? And I'm like, Nope, no,
not this week. Something else this week, um, And I've
been working on it kind of in the background, a
little at a time, honestly since last fall, and for
some reason, I just wanted to be a little more
languid with it, so I would work on other topics
and I'd come back to this one periodically, and then
(00:44):
I finally just like buckled down and got all of
my my research together. Emily de Chatelat's early life would
make an absolutely marvelous TV series. Her later life is
It could be something of an inspired tragedy and the
love it offers up a glimpse at someone who figured
out how to take advantage of their privilege to be
(01:06):
the person that they wanted to be, even though they
were really bucking tradition and societal expectation, and she challenged
the philosophic and scientific world of her time. And while
she was eclipsed after her death by her far more
famous lover, in the last century, and specifically the last
several decades, historians have taken a closer look at this
(01:27):
blazingly smart eighteenth century frenchwoman who prioritized her love of
learning above all else. Gabrielle Emily Tonilier de Brettoy was
born in Paris on December of seventeen o six. She
was the daughter of wealth. Her father was Baron Louis
(01:47):
Nicola la brett and he was part of Louis the
fourteenth royal household, so a part of the noblest Robe.
Her mother, Gabrielle and de Ferule, was the daughter of
Charles de Frouley, who had a distinguished military career and
was Captain of the French Guard before becoming Grand Marshal
(02:08):
of the House of the King. Gabrielle And had been
educated to the extent that most young women in the
late seventeenth century France would have been. She spent some
of her youth in a convent, and she didn't receive
formal schooling outside of that setting, but her daughter, Emily
had a very different upbringing. Emily's father, seeing that his
(02:29):
daughter was very curious with quote uncommon capacity and vigor
of mind, consented for her to learn about mathematics and
poetry and languages and other topics that sparked her interest,
although this is alleged to have caused some strain with Gabrielle,
who did not want her daughter raised outside of the
same tradition she had grown up in. Her father even
(02:51):
had her take fencing lessons and ride horses, very outside
the norm for a girl at the time, and the
multiple languages that she picked up in her formative year,
particularly Latin, would be very useful later in her life.
When Emily was ten, Louis Nicola had the scientist and
writer Bernard le Bouvier de Fontanelle visit their home for
(03:12):
an evening and have this casual chat about astronomy. And
this was really a way for him to offer his
daughter some private instruction, and she just really soaked up
everything that Fontanelle had told her about solar systems that
orbited stars similar to our son, and about the Milky Way.
Emily really loved it and visitors like Santanelle were fairly regular,
(03:37):
and that opened Emily's worldview, and it made her mother
more and more worried. There are actually some differing accounts
as to whether Gabrielle Anne was dismayed about her daughter's
proclivities towards study versus what she thought were more appropriate activities,
but it seems whether she was angry about it or not,
her real concern was her daughter's future. She wanted to
(04:00):
send Emily to a strict convent school, but Louis Nicola
refused to let that happen, and instead their daughter, sometimes awkward,
infinitely inquisitive, stayed home almost all the time as a
sort of compromise. They did have a beautiful place that
overlooked the Tuilerie, so it's not the worst place to
have to hang out at home all the time. But
(04:21):
she was growing up, and that meant that eventually she
was either going to have to go to a convent
or she had to get married, because there were not
a lot of other choices for women in early eighteenth
century France. Yeah, that sort of circles back around to
just what we talked about with Alempti Gouge about she
wrote a lot about how there were not other options
for women besides getting married or going into the convent.
(04:43):
So as she grew into her teenage years, Emily became
quite a beauty by some accounts, and that eased the
family's mind a little bit. It made it more likely
that she would be able to make a good marriage match.
There's also a description, though, that describes her as more
awkward and plane, so beauty was probably in the eye
of the beholder here. She was introduced Versailles at the
(05:06):
age of sixteen so that she could meet a potential husband. Emily,
seeing that the men of the court were self indulgent
and to her mind, ridiculous, is said to have come
up with a plan that she would tell everyone in
the court exactly who she was. Her thinking here was
that she would either attract a man who understood that
(05:27):
she was unique and needed some space, or she would
scare away all of these shallow men who had simply
seen her as another pretty young woman to woo up
until that point. Yeah, she didn't want to deal with
their for volity, so her plan was to challenge one
of the royal guards at Versailles to a sword fight.
(05:49):
To be clear, this is not like a challenge to
a duel that's intended to end in someone's death. It
was a physical challenge to see who would win the day,
and of course, something this unusual brought everyone at court
out to watch. So she did meet her plan of
telling everyone exactly who she was all in one go,
and Emily did really, really well. Actually, the match ended
(06:11):
in a draw, which was quite an accomplishment considering her
opponent was trained in combat. You'll recall she had some
fencing lessons when she was younger. Her mother was of
course horrified when she found out about this entire thing,
writing quote, we may be forced to send her to
a convent after all, but no abbess would accept her.
It definitely seems like the setup for a period TV show. Oh,
(06:33):
I would watch it in a New York minute. After
that whole sword fight experience, all the men who had
been bothering Emily started to leave her alone, and she
started a period of self guided education. She bought what
books she could with her allowance, but her father's income
had dwindled and he couldn't keep sending her more money
(06:56):
for more books, so she leaned on her skills in math,
and she taught herself to count cards, and she started
gambling so she could earn more book money. And while
her father seemed to be pretty proud of her level
of ingenuity here, he also recognized that this kind of
behavior could not go on forever. She was going to
(07:17):
have to get married at some point. Yeah, he wrote
letters shore. He talked about how she had just cleaned
out a whole bunch of people playing cards. She was
apparently very good at it, and she liked gambling pretty
much for the rest of her life. And Emily realized
this couldn't go on forever as well, and as she
kind of made peace with this reality, she very carefully
(07:38):
considered which gentleman of the court she would be comfortable
offering her attentions to, and ultimately her marriage match was
a marquis, a military man who was in his thirties
and seemed polite. In seventy five, Emily married Marquis flan
Claude Duchestel Lomon, thus becoming a marquise. And this was
(07:59):
to be clear in her ranged marriage. It wasn't like
she wooed him. She was just kind of like, maybe
this one and the families worked out the business arrangements
um and it was very beneficial for both families. Right
Emily's new husband could take care of her financially, and
while the Boitoi family was not as wealthy as it
had once been, the powerful connections that Duche gained through
(08:20):
his new in laws were pretty substantial. If you're noting
that difference in the name between Duchatel, which is how
Emily is known today and Duchestela, that is not an
accident or an error, and we're going to come back
to it. This marriage really wasn't romantic, but in many
ways floren Claude was about as good of a match
as Emily could have made in the French court. He
(08:42):
didn't inflict a whole lot of rules on his new bride.
She was still able to visit her brothers and ride horses,
although she could not do either of those things alone.
After spending the summer in Paris, the couple moved to
the town of Simour in Burgundy, where floren Claude had
been given the governorship by his father as a wedding gift.
(09:03):
The couple lived pretty separate lives, and that was common
at the time, and in this marriage, Emily had three
children who had a daughter and two sons. Their daughter,
Gabrielle Pauline, was born one year into the marriage on
June seventy six. Seventeen months later, on November twentie seventy seven,
their son Floren Louis was born. Their youngest child, Francoistur,
(09:27):
was born on April eleventh, seventeen thirty three, but he
unfortunately died in infancy. Florence Claude was also an officer
in the Royal Army, and that meant he was away
for long periods of time once the children were born.
It seems as though Emily was perceived as having delivered
on her responsibilities to the marriage contract, and she was
able to live more or less as she pleased without
(09:50):
any kind of interference from her husband. After sticking by
his side and traveling with him on deployments for the
first five years they were married, she went back to
Paris and they really didn't live together again after that point,
although they did see each other from time to time. Essentially,
he was her benefactor for the rest of her life.
This enabled her to pursue her studies and her projects
(10:13):
as she wished without having to worry about making a
living sounds pretty ideal compared to what she was looking for.
Sounds dreamy. Uh. In a moment, we are going to
talk about dou Chatelet's transition into a new phase of
her life, but before we do that, we will take
a quick sponsor break. After the birth of her third child, Emily,
(10:40):
as we said, returned to society, and almost immediately, at
the age of twenty four, she began an affair with
famed womanizer Louis Francois Almond d'a vigne rot duplaci, Duc
de Richelieu, and the two of them were an item
for a year and a half, and the Duke is
said to have encouraged Emily to bring an even aren't
structured approach to her learning and higher tutors to guide
(11:03):
her through various subjects rather than continuing to work just
on her own. This affair ended amicably. The Duke and
Emily remained friends for the remainder of her life, and
they wrote each other long letters, like ten to twenty
pages at a time. These letters discussed philosophy and literature
and metaphysics, and while they both may have moved on romantically,
(11:28):
and it said that Emily is the one who ended
that romantic relationship. Richelieu had always spoken to friends about
how incredibly smart she was, and that intellect was something
that he really valued in her as a friend. Yeah,
as a as a character in history, Richilieu is said
to have been the inspiration for Valmont in lil He
(11:51):
was really truly an infamous womanizer. And I I read
one comment, but I didn't fact check it that Emily
was the only woman who ever left him, uh, which
is just an interesting trivia on her part. In seventeen
thirties three, when Emily dou Chatela was in her late twenties,
she met the man who would in many ways define
(12:11):
her life story, at least as it has often been portrayed,
and that is Voltaire. At the time, he was thirty eight,
and he was almost instantly smitten with the smart, quick
witted young woman, writing shortly after they met, quote, why
did you only reach me so late? What happened to
my life before? I'd hunted for love but found only
mirages in actuality. The two of them had probably met
(12:36):
years before this, when Emily was still a little girl.
Voltaire had been one of her father's friends and had
visited their home but meeting as adults, there was this
instant attraction between the two of them. In Voltaire, it
really seems like Emily de Chatelais had finally found a
partner with whom she could be entirely herself. She did
(12:57):
not have to hold back her interest in sign answer mathematics,
and while his expertise was in different areas, he was
really an intellectual match for her, and he truly became
the love of her life. Voltaire, of course, was already famous,
or rather infamous by this time. Uh this is a quick,
quick and dirty version of his life story. So he
(13:19):
was born Francois Maria Away, and he had initially been
charting a course for a career as a lawyer before
he became a writer. In seventeen seventeen, he was famously
arrested and spent eleven months in the Bastille when he
took credit for verses which had been circulating in Paris
that accused Philip the second Duke Dorrillon, who was the
regent at the time of an incestuous relationship with his daughter.
(13:41):
It's actually unlikely that Voltaire had actually been the author
of that accusation, but he took credit for it. Just
the same he had also won critical acclaim for his
epic poem La Henriad that was about the life of
Anri the fourth and was published in seventeen twenty three.
His ongoing skewering of the French government and specific aristocrats
(14:04):
had led to his temporary exile to England. After he
had been permitted to return to Paris, he kept writing
plays and critiques, and he became incredibly rich. And it
was during this pretty heavy time in his life that
he met dou Chatela and that shift in the name
from Douchastel, which sometimes you'll see it with one else
sometimes with two, to Chatela, that is attributed to Voltaire.
(14:28):
He added that excellent circonflex over the a to indicate
in emitted s as a form of shorthand. Because everything
was not standardized at this time, there were still stylistic
choices that were completely optional for various people, and over
time that version is what became the standardized version of
the name. Emily took on a private tutor. She might
(14:49):
have been following up on reach lose advice here. That
tutor was Pierre Louis Moreau de Malportweet. He was a
student of Johann Bernoulli, and through mal Pertweet, Emily was
introduced to another man who would in some ways define
her life, and that was Sir Isaac Newton. Now where
their timelines overlap a little bit, Newton was actually already
(15:12):
dead by this point, so she wasn't introduced to the
man himself, but to his work. Newton's Prince Shipia for Reference,
was written in sixteen eighty seven, and Newton died in
seventeen twenty seven. This whole period of freedom and a
renewed commitment to her studies made Emily de Chatelauer feel
as though she was changing as a person, really significantly.
(15:34):
She wrote of this period in the early seventeen thirties
as one in which she was leaving one life behind
and engaging in another. And one of the fun stories
about her absolute unwillingness to accept the limitations that society
attempted to place on her during this time involves walking
into a Paris cafe to chat with one of her
(15:56):
math tutors, which I think was Marple Tweet. This establishment,
cafe Gladeau, catered to the intelligent CIA and it had
a no women policy because they would presumably merely distract
from the very important conversations being had. After having been
escorted out of the cafe, dou Chatelet came up with
another of her plans. She had a suit of men's
(16:17):
clothes made and she wore those anytime she wanted to
meet someone at the cafe, and allegedly these people that
she was meeting would always invite her to their table
as though she were a gentleman, and the staff, of
course still knew she was a woman. But as long
as she maintained the pretense of being a man and
the people she met played along, they would serve her
and allowed her to meet with her fellow mathematicians and philosophers.
(16:40):
Emily moved to a family chateau on the border of
Champagne and Lauren. This was away from the social rules
of Paris, and she did this to focus on her studies.
The year after meeting Voltaire, she invited him to join
her there, and at the time he was in danger
of being arrested for his vocal critiques of the French
government that was in his lecture Philosophy. He had once
(17:04):
again invited the ire of the monarchy. So the de
Chatelet chateau was a very welcome escape for him and
dou Chatelat and Voltaire made the sere chateau. They're perfect
intellectual and romantic getaway, and they set up a laboratory
for experiments that they wanted to do with electricity and light.
The property underwent pretty significant renovation, largely under Voltaire's direction,
(17:29):
and it expanded a great deal while the two lived there.
Voltaire eventually had a stone gate archway constructed which had
images representing the various arts and sciences that the pair
were interested in carved into it. So things like a compass,
a ruler, a pen, a world map, a painter's palette,
and other icons. And then there were also the words
(17:50):
refuge of the arts, seclusion in which my heart falls
abides in deep peace, You give the happiness that the
world promises in vain. As the two became more deeply entwined,
they also established a sort of hive of intellectual pursuits.
Historian David Bonanis included a line in his book about
(18:10):
Douchatel and Voltaire that Holly really loved. He said that
their quote affair was at the Enlightenment's very heart. This
is because the two of them were connected to and
connected with all the prominent thinkers of the day, and
in a lot of cases they were reading letters or
published works by those people together at breakfast, and then
(18:32):
they would retire to their separate rooms to both work
on the ideas that had been introduced and to see
if they could frame them in a new way or
expand on what was a lot of cutting edge math
and science and philosophy. Yeah, they would kind of both
run away and do their own thing and then come
back together and be like, here's how I'm thinking about this,
here's how I'm thinking about this, which is sort of
(18:53):
brilliant and beautiful. I think this sounds great. It does,
especially because they were so different in terms of like,
he didn't have this ands in math background and she
didn't have the the literature background that he had, and
so they just looked at problems with completely different perspectives.
And additionally, during all of this they were known to
have visits from those great minds of the day. For example,
(19:14):
Italian mathematician Francesco Algarotti spent a month and a half
with them in seventeen thirty five, and at one point
Emily's husband even visited and he would stay at the chateau,
and he was completely unbothered by the presence of Voltaire.
At that point, Emily and Voltaire were kind of living
his husband and wife, Florent Claud did not mind. Uh.
Sometimes when guests stayed with them, Voltaire and du Chatelet
(19:36):
would stage theatrical productions to amuse their friends. Throughout all
this time, Emily continued to refine and expand her knowledge
by hiring experts to teach her. In seventeen thirty five,
she took a new math tutor, which was Alexis Claro.
She would hire several more over the years, and she
was truly one of those people who both sought mastery
(19:59):
and felt that she could never achieve it just wasn't
achievable at all. As new concepts or ideas were introduced,
she was always seeking out more information. Yeah, she she
recognized mastery was a moving target in the world they
were living in because there was so much really exciting
work going on. In seventy seven, de Chatelet wrote her
(20:19):
Desert That's a Dissertation on the nature and spread of fire,
and in it she asserted that light and heat were
from the same substance, rather than heat being some sort
of invisible force that was different, and she submitted without
her name attached this paper to an essay competition run
by the Royal Academy of Sciences. She did not win,
(20:41):
but her paper was published by the essay committee, along
with several others that were deemed noteworthy. One of those
others was by Voltaire. In the years following that publication,
do Chatelet worked on a book that landed her in
very public debates with prominent members of the scientific community.
We will talk about that work after we pause to
hear from one of the sponsors that keeps our show going.
(21:11):
The seventeen forty publication of Institution de Physique that's Institution
of Physics. You'll also sometimes see it translated as Foundation
of Physics proved to be a flashpoint of sorts for
du Chatela, and in this book she distilled the metaphysical
concepts that Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz had introduced in his work
into a format that was relatively easy to understand for
(21:32):
the layman. And then here is what got a lot
of people really upset. She combined those ideas with the
work of Newton. So while most scientists and philosophers of
the day. We're working with a mechanistic perspective which builds
on the work of Renee de Carlton and Isaac Newton
in the areas of gravity, in the relationship of heavenly
bodies UH, and is founded on the idea that there
(21:55):
is a predictable mechanism at work in these matters. She
had a different approach, so de Chatelet discussed these Newtonian
concepts only after several chapters on God, space, time, and
the nature of matter. She intended to take elements of
previously oppositional ideas and find a way to make them
(22:16):
function together in a bigger concept. She felt there was
a way for the observable laws of nature and a
deeper understanding of what many people believed to be unknowable,
that was the reasoning of a higher power to intersect.
For one, this was all perceived by the established Newtonian
scholars of the time as overreaching and rather insulting, and
(22:38):
do Chatelet had criticized the work of some of her
contemporaries in the manuscript, which did not help matters. It
led to a public back and forth with Jean Jacques,
who responded to her criticism with a publication of his own.
It was particularly sharpened tone, and this debate is considered
part of the vis viva debates that played out starting
in the eighteenth century, with roots going back decades prior.
(23:02):
These debates were an ongoing argument about mechanics as a
science of motion and the vis viva, which was Latin
for living force. The very very boiled down version of
this was an argument about the conservation of momentum versus
the conservation of kinetic energy, and which one of these
(23:23):
is the true measure or the true quantity of motion.
That doesn't really capture the nuance of the debate because
alongside the mechanics were components of the argument that involved
philosophy and even theology. But the main point of contention
as it related to du Chatelet's work, was that she
believed that Newton's manner of calculating vis viva multiplying mass
(23:48):
by velocity was not correct. She favored the Leibnitz calculation,
which multiplied mass by the square of velocity. Was the
secretary of the Royal Academy of Science ANSWS, so the
fact that he was openly debating a woman on matters
of science and philosophy. Was a very big deal. This
is sometimes pointed to as the first public scientific debate
(24:11):
between a man and a woman. Uh, there's a lot
of ancient history that might have included that that we
know about, so I'm reluctant to use those kinds of superlatives.
But it was a very big deal. It put to
Chedelais in a position where she had to defend her work,
knowing that all of the Royal Academy was following it,
and that a lot of people frankly thought she was
a heretic. But this also gave her a pretty significant
(24:33):
level of credibility. When she published the second edition of
her book in seventeen forty two, the debate with marn
was included in it, with the biting line from her
retort quote, I have read and reread your thesis and
cannot find anything different from what I've expounded. Maybe we
should define clearly what reading means. I love this too.
(24:55):
It's like hissing with a pens. Then German mathematician Johann
Samuel Koenig, who had tutored Emily beginning in seventeen thirty nine,
she was in Brussels on business at that time. He
accused her of plagiarizing his work when she was writing
Institution de Physique. There is evidence that early drafts of
(25:20):
her work contained the contested section, and she had written
those before he had come to teach her. But her
reputation really suffered just the same because of the accusations.
Any insight that her work might have included became clouded
over with this suspicion of intellectual theft. But despite all
of this, any of the negatives were outweighed by the
(25:42):
fact that Institution de Physique was very popular, and it
was translated into both German and Italian and published in
multiple editions. Because it kept selling out. Over time, the
romance between du Chatelet and Voltaire cooled, although the two
of them did remain close. The work of Sir Isaac
Newton would prove to be a particularly problematic topic for
(26:04):
the two of them. Emily easily understood the mathematical principles
involved in Newton's work and Voltaire really could not, And
when she explored ways to push Newton's work farther than
it had gone and then integrated into a larger philosophical system,
this created a double layer of insults for her beloved.
(26:27):
For one, Voltaire did not really grasp it and did
not like to feel foolish. And for another, he sort
of hero worships Sir Isaac Newton, so do Chafele suggesting
that there was anything lacking in the man's work really
irritated him. Although they no longer shared the romantic passion
that they had before, they remained very close and were
(26:48):
devoted to one another. Yeah, they still continued to live together.
So uh, there's an interesting passage. I didn't include it here,
but there was one moment whereas their relationship was breaking up.
In terms of a romance, she wrote something like, why
would a smart woman care if she's involved with someone
or not? Anyway, like this is nothing to me, I'm fine,
(27:09):
move on um. In seventy though, Emily de Chatelai found
romantic love once again, this time with the poet and
military officer Jean Flancois de Saint Lambert, who was ten
years younger than she was. In this affair led to
a significant problem because Emily got pregnant, and that is
a problem because as a forty two year old woman
(27:30):
in the seventeen forties, she understood that there was a
very real likelihood that she would not survive that pregnancy.
She and Voltaire continued to spend their time together while
she was pregnant. They shared a house just a few
blocks from the Tuler. Each of them had their own
suite there. Stal Lambert had apparently written to her saying
(27:51):
that he wanted her to come to Laura, where he
was stationed in military service at the time. But Emily
had a project that she prioritized over love, and that
was her translation and commentary on Newton's Prince Shipia. She
wanted to finish this work on Newton before the baby came,
because if the worst happened, her manuscript would be complete,
(28:14):
and she felt this really deep compulsion, something that she
described as a frightening need to finish it. And Emity
worked grueling hours according to a regiment that she established,
and she actually wrote this all out in letters to
her lover. She arose between eight and nine am and
went straight to writing. She would not stop until three pm.
(28:35):
Then she would take a break, have coffee and like
a snack, not really a meal, and then go right
back to working at four pm, which she did until
ten at night, and then she would have dinner and
spend time with Voltaire. She had a two hour block there.
She did not go to bed after that. Instead, she
would stay up to complete another block of writing from
midnight to five am before finally getting some sleep. She
(28:57):
had always been a little light on sleep throughout her life,
but this is really rough when you consider, like this
is third trimester behavior. And she herself noted that this
schedule quote required a mind and body of iron. And
when she had first determined she had to finish this
work before she had her baby, her schedule wasn't quite
as demanding, but as time wore on, she realized it
(29:18):
had to get demanding and it had to be an
all out effort or she was never going to make it.
Throughout the pregnancy, desate Lake continued to write to Jean
Francois de Saint Ambert, asserting how deeply she remained in
love with him. She talked about how her body was
in various pains from the pregnancy, but her heart retained
its vigor and caring for him, and she wanted him
(29:41):
with her because without him, she wrote quote, I see
only black. Emily de Chatelaer finished her translation and commentary
on Newton's Principia at the end of August seventy nine
in Luneville, at the home of the Duc de Lorne.
She had left Paris to give birth because she was
already a target of ridicule society. Gossips talked about how
(30:02):
absurdly stupid she was to have gotten pregnant by her
lover at the age of forty two, and even her
beloved friend and former paramor Voltaire, made jokes about the
baby being one of du Chatelet's quote miscellaneous works. On
September four, she had her baby. This was a daughter
named Stanislaus Adelaide, and the delivery, to everybody's surprise, seemed
(30:25):
like it had gone smoothly. It was considered a fairly
easy birth, but there was a complication afterward, and six
days later, after several days with a fever, Emily died
of a pulmonary embolism. Voltaire, San Lambert and her husband
Flauren Claude were all with her in her final moments.
The daughter she had given birth to died before she
(30:48):
reached the age of two. After Emily du Chatelet's death,
she was wildly misrepresented by the gossips of the day,
and though she had been incredibly forward thinking and way
ahead of her tone time, it became so absurd to
many people that a woman would have come up with
the ideas that she had, that they were attributed to men,
or they were simply discussed without much mention of attribution
(31:11):
to her work. Emmanuel Kant compared the idea of Emily
de Chatelat as a great thinker as being as absurd
as a woman with a beard. Man. Emmanuel Kant is
a jerk on so many levels of that statement. Because
of Voltaire's prominence, I meanly, Chatelet was largely relegated to
(31:32):
the role of his love interest rather than a collaborator
and driving force in his work. He was actually the
person who worked and lobbied assistants from other intellects of
the day to get her translation and commentaries on Newton's
Prince Shipia published. Voltaire even wrote an intro for it,
but it took ten years. It wasn't until seventeen fifty
(31:54):
nine that her translation and the additional writing the that
accompanied it came into print. That trans lation is still
used today because it is so good, and it was
the only French language version of it for a very
long time, and in it, dou Chatelat created ways to
describe and explain the many mathematical proofs that Newton had
(32:14):
used in ways that made them more accessible for readers.
As she had done with other concepts earlier in her life,
she was also able to draw more direct lines from
his work to the mechanisms of energy and gravity than
he had been able to do in his day, and
as a consequence, she kind of opened up the way
these ideas could be parsed and quantified for those who
follow her. Some of the most lauded work that came
(32:36):
after her was built on her commentary on Principia. Einstein's
theory of special relativity, for example, has been cited as
using a square to represent the speed of light. Because
of the groundwork that she laid in this publication. There's
also been a great deal more examination as to whether
Emily dou Chatelet was helping Voltaire right his elements of
(32:57):
Newton's philosophy, which was actually published two years before her work.
There was certainly a change in his work during his
years with du Chatlet, but whether it was because she
was dictating or simply inspiring him is still something of
a debate. Yeah, there are certain papers of hers that
are mixed in with his papers in various places that
(33:18):
people point to as evidence that really she was the
one that was kind of developing a lot of this stuff.
There is one rumor that he told someone that she
was basically dictating to him, but that's not substantiated. We
just don't know. I like the idea that they were
just driving each other intellectually to new places neither would
have gotten to on their own asked for Voltaire. Soon
(33:39):
after Emily's death, he moved to Berlin and then eventually
made his way to Switzerland, and it was there that
he wrote what is probably his most famous work, Candide,
in seventeen fifty nine. Incidentally, that work famously take shots
at the work of Leibniz, who do Chateaule both translated
and interpreted for her readers. Voltaire outlived du Chatelet by
twin nine years. He died in Paris in seventeen seventy eight.
(34:04):
After de Chatelet's death, the Serree Chateau passed through a
number of different hands in her family before it was sold.
Today it's privately owned, but it's also designated as a
historical monument. That's the status that's had since so much
of Emily deu Chatelet's life was about living outside the
boundaries that have been set by society as a woman
(34:25):
that I thought it would be good to close with
a quote from her, and this appeared in the preface
to the French version of Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees,
which she translated, and she wrote quote, I confess that
if I were king, I would get women to participate
in all the privileges of humanity, especially those of the mind.
It's as though women were born only to flirt, so
(34:45):
they are given nothing but that activity to exercise their minds.
The new education I propose would do all of humanity
a great deal of good. Women would be better off
for it, and men would gain a new source of competition.
I love her so much, um, I love all of
(35:07):
the uh, the just stories. When she was young and
she was like, I'll figure out a way around this problem.
I love the I'm gonna have a sword fight. That's
how we're going to get out of this jam. For
listener mail, I have an email from our listener Greg
because he wrote in to kind of help me with
(35:28):
my question that I asked in that episode about color deficiency,
uh and how certain things work for him. So he writes, Hi,
Tracy and Honley, I listened with interest to your podcast
on John Dalton and his descriptions of the world as
he saw it. I too have the common male red
green deficiency. But it was very clear in hearing his
descriptions that we see the world very differently. I can
(35:48):
see both green and red, but only some shades of
each are distinguishable by their color. Blue is blue, but
purple is pretty much blue too. I can only tell
one from the other if they are adjac in. The
purple is usually the one that is lighter in shade. Yes,
odd yellow is yellow, except when I find out that
it's actually a shade of green. To this day, I
(36:09):
truly don't know what color beige is. I'm laughing as
an aside because I'm like, you don't need to know.
It's not worth it. Um orange. Strangely, that one seems okay.
Where all this hits home is what you noted at
the end of your Behind the Scenes podcast, where confusion
ranging from annoyance to safety comes into play. The green
(36:29):
and yellow led indicators on electronic equipment are almost indistinguishable
for me, so their use as indicators of done versus
not done can be problematic. Worst traffic signal lights are red, yellow,
and white during the day. That's fine. At night, however,
the green light becomes hard to distinguish from nearby street lighting.
If I don't see the actual light change, I might
(36:50):
miss it. One of the most valuable apps that I
found for my smartphone is one which uses the camera
to descriptive lee and numerically describe the color that it
is seeing. Well, it does help in my daily life.
It does have its limits. To my wife's dismay, I
still cannot pick out the ripe bananas from the ones
that are just this side of wood. It is, however,
essential in sorting out the various flavors of Skittles, Reese's pieces,
(37:13):
and Eminem's technology has its place. Keep up the good work,
critic um. He writes, ps. I'm also left handed, while
not usually thought of a safety critical, try using a
skill saw at sometime with your other hand. Yeah, that
little button doesn't work. Ergonomics is a serious topic that
we shouldn't take so lightly. Um. I agree with that.
(37:33):
My my dad, who I mentioned in that behind the
scenes also left handed and was kind of forced to
use his right hand because of that, because his dad
was like, you will be able to use tools or
fire or rifle or do any of the things that
we need on the farm. We don't make you do this. Um,
thank you so much. Greg. It's it is really fascinating
to hear his version of it, right. Yeah, And I'm
(37:53):
also glad that you picked this one to read because
when I read it this morning, it reminded me of how, um,
when and the pandemic started and we all started wearing masks.
I bought an app on my phone called Hearing Helper,
which does live transcriptions of what you're saying for people
who might not be able to read your lips because
you have a mask on. So there are a lot
(38:16):
of accessibility things that are being approached through apps. Yeah,
apps bridge a lot of gaps that I didn't mean
to be quite so rhymy there, but it is true. Um,
it's an interesting thing. I know. I have seen also
some people making the masks that have the clear window
in them. Yeah, if you can make those that don't
fog up when people talk, it's gonna say, like, that's
(38:38):
the problem. Right, then you're obscured not by fabric, but
by like a wall of film as people exhale and
create a condensation blinder. Um, it's it's really really fair. Yeah,
don't worry about beige. You're not missing anything. Someone who
loves beige just got offended and I hope not. But
(38:58):
it's just one of those colors. And I'm like, I
of you would like to write to us and share
your thoughts on color blindness or how apps can help
us get across some divides. Uh, you are free to
do so. You can do that at History podcast at
iHeart radio dot com. You can also find us everywhere
on social media as Missed in History, and you can
subscribe to the show if you haven't already. That is
(39:20):
easy to do on the iHeart Radio app, at Apple Podcasts,
or wherever it is you listen. Stuff you Missed in
History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For
more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Oh, Tracy,
We're finally getting to the topic that's been on my
list forever, ye forever enough that there have been several
(00:24):
times in the last couple of months where You're like,
is this the week you're doing that thing? And I'm like, Nope, no,
not this week. Something else this week, um, And I've
been working on it kind of in the background, a
little at a time, honestly since last fall, and for
some reason, I just wanted to be a little more
languid with it, so I would work on other topics
and I'd come back to this one periodically, and then
(00:44):
I finally just like buckled down and got all of
my my research together. Emily de Chatelat's early life would
make an absolutely marvelous TV series. Her later life is
It could be something of an inspired tragedy and the
love it offers up a glimpse at someone who figured
out how to take advantage of their privilege to be
(01:06):
the person that they wanted to be, even though they
were really bucking tradition and societal expectation, and she challenged
the philosophic and scientific world of her time. And while
she was eclipsed after her death by her far more
famous lover, in the last century, and specifically the last
several decades, historians have taken a closer look at this
(01:27):
blazingly smart eighteenth century frenchwoman who prioritized her love of
learning above all else. Gabrielle Emily Tonilier de Brettoy was
born in Paris on December of seventeen o six. She
was the daughter of wealth. Her father was Baron Louis
(01:47):
Nicola la brett and he was part of Louis the
fourteenth royal household, so a part of the noblest Robe.
Her mother, Gabrielle and de Ferule, was the daughter of
Charles de Frouley, who had a distinguished military career and
was Captain of the French Guard before becoming Grand Marshal
(02:08):
of the House of the King. Gabrielle And had been
educated to the extent that most young women in the
late seventeenth century France would have been. She spent some
of her youth in a convent, and she didn't receive
formal schooling outside of that setting, but her daughter, Emily
had a very different upbringing. Emily's father, seeing that his
(02:29):
daughter was very curious with quote uncommon capacity and vigor
of mind, consented for her to learn about mathematics and
poetry and languages and other topics that sparked her interest,
although this is alleged to have caused some strain with Gabrielle,
who did not want her daughter raised outside of the
same tradition she had grown up in. Her father even
(02:51):
had her take fencing lessons and ride horses, very outside
the norm for a girl at the time, and the
multiple languages that she picked up in her formative year,
particularly Latin, would be very useful later in her life.
When Emily was ten, Louis Nicola had the scientist and
writer Bernard le Bouvier de Fontanelle visit their home for
(03:12):
an evening and have this casual chat about astronomy. And
this was really a way for him to offer his
daughter some private instruction, and she just really soaked up
everything that Fontanelle had told her about solar systems that
orbited stars similar to our son, and about the Milky Way.
Emily really loved it and visitors like Santanelle were fairly regular,
(03:37):
and that opened Emily's worldview, and it made her mother
more and more worried. There are actually some differing accounts
as to whether Gabrielle Anne was dismayed about her daughter's
proclivities towards study versus what she thought were more appropriate activities,
but it seems whether she was angry about it or not,
her real concern was her daughter's future. She wanted to
(04:00):
send Emily to a strict convent school, but Louis Nicola
refused to let that happen, and instead their daughter, sometimes awkward,
infinitely inquisitive, stayed home almost all the time as a
sort of compromise. They did have a beautiful place that
overlooked the Tuilerie, so it's not the worst place to
have to hang out at home all the time. But
(04:21):
she was growing up, and that meant that eventually she
was either going to have to go to a convent
or she had to get married, because there were not
a lot of other choices for women in early eighteenth
century France. Yeah, that sort of circles back around to
just what we talked about with Alempti Gouge about she
wrote a lot about how there were not other options
for women besides getting married or going into the convent.
(04:43):
So as she grew into her teenage years, Emily became
quite a beauty by some accounts, and that eased the
family's mind a little bit. It made it more likely
that she would be able to make a good marriage match.
There's also a description, though, that describes her as more
awkward and plane, so beauty was probably in the eye
of the beholder here. She was introduced Versailles at the
(05:06):
age of sixteen so that she could meet a potential husband. Emily,
seeing that the men of the court were self indulgent
and to her mind, ridiculous, is said to have come
up with a plan that she would tell everyone in
the court exactly who she was. Her thinking here was
that she would either attract a man who understood that
(05:27):
she was unique and needed some space, or she would
scare away all of these shallow men who had simply
seen her as another pretty young woman to woo up
until that point. Yeah, she didn't want to deal with
their for volity, so her plan was to challenge one
of the royal guards at Versailles to a sword fight.
(05:49):
To be clear, this is not like a challenge to
a duel that's intended to end in someone's death. It
was a physical challenge to see who would win the day,
and of course, something this unusual brought everyone at court
out to watch. So she did meet her plan of
telling everyone exactly who she was all in one go,
and Emily did really, really well. Actually, the match ended
(06:11):
in a draw, which was quite an accomplishment considering her
opponent was trained in combat. You'll recall she had some
fencing lessons when she was younger. Her mother was of
course horrified when she found out about this entire thing,
writing quote, we may be forced to send her to
a convent after all, but no abbess would accept her.
It definitely seems like the setup for a period TV show. Oh,
(06:33):
I would watch it in a New York minute. After
that whole sword fight experience, all the men who had
been bothering Emily started to leave her alone, and she
started a period of self guided education. She bought what
books she could with her allowance, but her father's income
had dwindled and he couldn't keep sending her more money
(06:56):
for more books, so she leaned on her skills in math,
and she taught herself to count cards, and she started
gambling so she could earn more book money. And while
her father seemed to be pretty proud of her level
of ingenuity here, he also recognized that this kind of
behavior could not go on forever. She was going to
(07:17):
have to get married at some point. Yeah, he wrote
letters shore. He talked about how she had just cleaned
out a whole bunch of people playing cards. She was
apparently very good at it, and she liked gambling pretty
much for the rest of her life. And Emily realized
this couldn't go on forever as well, and as she
kind of made peace with this reality, she very carefully
(07:38):
considered which gentleman of the court she would be comfortable
offering her attentions to, and ultimately her marriage match was
a marquis, a military man who was in his thirties
and seemed polite. In seventy five, Emily married Marquis flan
Claude Duchestel Lomon, thus becoming a marquise. And this was
(07:59):
to be clear in her ranged marriage. It wasn't like
she wooed him. She was just kind of like, maybe
this one and the families worked out the business arrangements
um and it was very beneficial for both families. Right
Emily's new husband could take care of her financially, and
while the Boitoi family was not as wealthy as it
had once been, the powerful connections that Duche gained through
(08:20):
his new in laws were pretty substantial. If you're noting
that difference in the name between Duchatel, which is how
Emily is known today and Duchestela, that is not an
accident or an error, and we're going to come back
to it. This marriage really wasn't romantic, but in many
ways floren Claude was about as good of a match
as Emily could have made in the French court. He
(08:42):
didn't inflict a whole lot of rules on his new bride.
She was still able to visit her brothers and ride horses,
although she could not do either of those things alone.
After spending the summer in Paris, the couple moved to
the town of Simour in Burgundy, where floren Claude had
been given the governorship by his father as a wedding gift.
(09:03):
The couple lived pretty separate lives, and that was common
at the time, and in this marriage, Emily had three
children who had a daughter and two sons. Their daughter,
Gabrielle Pauline, was born one year into the marriage on
June seventy six. Seventeen months later, on November twentie seventy seven,
their son Floren Louis was born. Their youngest child, Francoistur,
(09:27):
was born on April eleventh, seventeen thirty three, but he
unfortunately died in infancy. Florence Claude was also an officer
in the Royal Army, and that meant he was away
for long periods of time once the children were born.
It seems as though Emily was perceived as having delivered
on her responsibilities to the marriage contract, and she was
able to live more or less as she pleased without
(09:50):
any kind of interference from her husband. After sticking by
his side and traveling with him on deployments for the
first five years they were married, she went back to
Paris and they really didn't live together again after that point,
although they did see each other from time to time. Essentially,
he was her benefactor for the rest of her life.
This enabled her to pursue her studies and her projects
(10:13):
as she wished without having to worry about making a
living sounds pretty ideal compared to what she was looking for.
Sounds dreamy. Uh. In a moment, we are going to
talk about dou Chatelet's transition into a new phase of
her life, but before we do that, we will take
a quick sponsor break. After the birth of her third child, Emily,
(10:40):
as we said, returned to society, and almost immediately, at
the age of twenty four, she began an affair with
famed womanizer Louis Francois Almond d'a vigne rot duplaci, Duc
de Richelieu, and the two of them were an item
for a year and a half, and the Duke is
said to have encouraged Emily to bring an even aren't
structured approach to her learning and higher tutors to guide
(11:03):
her through various subjects rather than continuing to work just
on her own. This affair ended amicably. The Duke and
Emily remained friends for the remainder of her life, and
they wrote each other long letters, like ten to twenty
pages at a time. These letters discussed philosophy and literature
and metaphysics, and while they both may have moved on romantically,
(11:28):
and it said that Emily is the one who ended
that romantic relationship. Richelieu had always spoken to friends about
how incredibly smart she was, and that intellect was something
that he really valued in her as a friend. Yeah,
as a as a character in history, Richilieu is said
to have been the inspiration for Valmont in lil He
(11:51):
was really truly an infamous womanizer. And I I read
one comment, but I didn't fact check it that Emily
was the only woman who ever left him, uh, which
is just an interesting trivia on her part. In seventeen
thirties three, when Emily dou Chatela was in her late twenties,
she met the man who would in many ways define
(12:11):
her life story, at least as it has often been portrayed,
and that is Voltaire. At the time, he was thirty eight,
and he was almost instantly smitten with the smart, quick
witted young woman, writing shortly after they met, quote, why
did you only reach me so late? What happened to
my life before? I'd hunted for love but found only
mirages in actuality. The two of them had probably met
(12:36):
years before this, when Emily was still a little girl.
Voltaire had been one of her father's friends and had
visited their home but meeting as adults, there was this
instant attraction between the two of them. In Voltaire, it
really seems like Emily de Chatelais had finally found a
partner with whom she could be entirely herself. She did
(12:57):
not have to hold back her interest in sign answer mathematics,
and while his expertise was in different areas, he was
really an intellectual match for her, and he truly became
the love of her life. Voltaire, of course, was already famous,
or rather infamous by this time. Uh this is a quick,
quick and dirty version of his life story. So he
(13:19):
was born Francois Maria Away, and he had initially been
charting a course for a career as a lawyer before
he became a writer. In seventeen seventeen, he was famously
arrested and spent eleven months in the Bastille when he
took credit for verses which had been circulating in Paris
that accused Philip the second Duke Dorrillon, who was the
regent at the time of an incestuous relationship with his daughter.
(13:41):
It's actually unlikely that Voltaire had actually been the author
of that accusation, but he took credit for it. Just
the same he had also won critical acclaim for his
epic poem La Henriad that was about the life of
Anri the fourth and was published in seventeen twenty three.
His ongoing skewering of the French government and specific aristocrats
(14:04):
had led to his temporary exile to England. After he
had been permitted to return to Paris, he kept writing
plays and critiques, and he became incredibly rich. And it
was during this pretty heavy time in his life that
he met dou Chatela and that shift in the name
from Douchastel, which sometimes you'll see it with one else
sometimes with two, to Chatela, that is attributed to Voltaire.
(14:28):
He added that excellent circonflex over the a to indicate
in emitted s as a form of shorthand. Because everything
was not standardized at this time, there were still stylistic
choices that were completely optional for various people, and over
time that version is what became the standardized version of
the name. Emily took on a private tutor. She might
(14:49):
have been following up on reach lose advice here. That
tutor was Pierre Louis Moreau de Malportweet. He was a
student of Johann Bernoulli, and through mal Pertweet, Emily was
introduced to another man who would in some ways define
her life, and that was Sir Isaac Newton. Now where
their timelines overlap a little bit, Newton was actually already
(15:12):
dead by this point, so she wasn't introduced to the
man himself, but to his work. Newton's Prince Shipia for Reference,
was written in sixteen eighty seven, and Newton died in
seventeen twenty seven. This whole period of freedom and a
renewed commitment to her studies made Emily de Chatelauer feel
as though she was changing as a person, really significantly.
(15:34):
She wrote of this period in the early seventeen thirties
as one in which she was leaving one life behind
and engaging in another. And one of the fun stories
about her absolute unwillingness to accept the limitations that society
attempted to place on her during this time involves walking
into a Paris cafe to chat with one of her
(15:56):
math tutors, which I think was Marple Tweet. This establishment,
cafe Gladeau, catered to the intelligent CIA and it had
a no women policy because they would presumably merely distract
from the very important conversations being had. After having been
escorted out of the cafe, dou Chatelet came up with
another of her plans. She had a suit of men's
(16:17):
clothes made and she wore those anytime she wanted to
meet someone at the cafe, and allegedly these people that
she was meeting would always invite her to their table
as though she were a gentleman, and the staff, of
course still knew she was a woman. But as long
as she maintained the pretense of being a man and
the people she met played along, they would serve her
and allowed her to meet with her fellow mathematicians and philosophers.
(16:40):
Emily moved to a family chateau on the border of
Champagne and Lauren. This was away from the social rules
of Paris, and she did this to focus on her studies.
The year after meeting Voltaire, she invited him to join
her there, and at the time he was in danger
of being arrested for his vocal critiques of the French
government that was in his lecture Philosophy. He had once
(17:04):
again invited the ire of the monarchy. So the de
Chatelet chateau was a very welcome escape for him and
dou Chatelat and Voltaire made the sere chateau. They're perfect
intellectual and romantic getaway, and they set up a laboratory
for experiments that they wanted to do with electricity and light.
The property underwent pretty significant renovation, largely under Voltaire's direction,
(17:29):
and it expanded a great deal while the two lived there.
Voltaire eventually had a stone gate archway constructed which had
images representing the various arts and sciences that the pair
were interested in carved into it. So things like a compass,
a ruler, a pen, a world map, a painter's palette,
and other icons. And then there were also the words
(17:50):
refuge of the arts, seclusion in which my heart falls
abides in deep peace, You give the happiness that the
world promises in vain. As the two became more deeply entwined,
they also established a sort of hive of intellectual pursuits.
Historian David Bonanis included a line in his book about
(18:10):
Douchatel and Voltaire that Holly really loved. He said that
their quote affair was at the Enlightenment's very heart. This
is because the two of them were connected to and
connected with all the prominent thinkers of the day, and
in a lot of cases they were reading letters or
published works by those people together at breakfast, and then
(18:32):
they would retire to their separate rooms to both work
on the ideas that had been introduced and to see
if they could frame them in a new way or
expand on what was a lot of cutting edge math
and science and philosophy. Yeah, they would kind of both
run away and do their own thing and then come
back together and be like, here's how I'm thinking about this,
here's how I'm thinking about this, which is sort of
(18:53):
brilliant and beautiful. I think this sounds great. It does,
especially because they were so different in terms of like,
he didn't have this ands in math background and she
didn't have the the literature background that he had, and
so they just looked at problems with completely different perspectives.
And additionally, during all of this they were known to
have visits from those great minds of the day. For example,
(19:14):
Italian mathematician Francesco Algarotti spent a month and a half
with them in seventeen thirty five, and at one point
Emily's husband even visited and he would stay at the chateau,
and he was completely unbothered by the presence of Voltaire.
At that point, Emily and Voltaire were kind of living
his husband and wife, Florent Claud did not mind. Uh.
Sometimes when guests stayed with them, Voltaire and du Chatelet
(19:36):
would stage theatrical productions to amuse their friends. Throughout all
this time, Emily continued to refine and expand her knowledge
by hiring experts to teach her. In seventeen thirty five,
she took a new math tutor, which was Alexis Claro.
She would hire several more over the years, and she
was truly one of those people who both sought mastery
(19:59):
and felt that she could never achieve it just wasn't
achievable at all. As new concepts or ideas were introduced,
she was always seeking out more information. Yeah, she she
recognized mastery was a moving target in the world they
were living in because there was so much really exciting
work going on. In seventy seven, de Chatelet wrote her
(20:19):
Desert That's a Dissertation on the nature and spread of fire,
and in it she asserted that light and heat were
from the same substance, rather than heat being some sort
of invisible force that was different, and she submitted without
her name attached this paper to an essay competition run
by the Royal Academy of Sciences. She did not win,
(20:41):
but her paper was published by the essay committee, along
with several others that were deemed noteworthy. One of those
others was by Voltaire. In the years following that publication,
do Chatelet worked on a book that landed her in
very public debates with prominent members of the scientific community.
We will talk about that work after we pause to
hear from one of the sponsors that keeps our show going.
(21:11):
The seventeen forty publication of Institution de Physique that's Institution
of Physics. You'll also sometimes see it translated as Foundation
of Physics proved to be a flashpoint of sorts for
du Chatela, and in this book she distilled the metaphysical
concepts that Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz had introduced in his work
into a format that was relatively easy to understand for
(21:32):
the layman. And then here is what got a lot
of people really upset. She combined those ideas with the
work of Newton. So while most scientists and philosophers of
the day. We're working with a mechanistic perspective which builds
on the work of Renee de Carlton and Isaac Newton
in the areas of gravity, in the relationship of heavenly
bodies UH, and is founded on the idea that there
(21:55):
is a predictable mechanism at work in these matters. She
had a different approach, so de Chatelet discussed these Newtonian
concepts only after several chapters on God, space, time, and
the nature of matter. She intended to take elements of
previously oppositional ideas and find a way to make them
(22:16):
function together in a bigger concept. She felt there was
a way for the observable laws of nature and a
deeper understanding of what many people believed to be unknowable,
that was the reasoning of a higher power to intersect.
For one, this was all perceived by the established Newtonian
scholars of the time as overreaching and rather insulting, and
(22:38):
do Chatelet had criticized the work of some of her
contemporaries in the manuscript, which did not help matters. It
led to a public back and forth with Jean Jacques,
who responded to her criticism with a publication of his own.
It was particularly sharpened tone, and this debate is considered
part of the vis viva debates that played out starting
in the eighteenth century, with roots going back decades prior.
(23:02):
These debates were an ongoing argument about mechanics as a
science of motion and the vis viva, which was Latin
for living force. The very very boiled down version of
this was an argument about the conservation of momentum versus
the conservation of kinetic energy, and which one of these
(23:23):
is the true measure or the true quantity of motion.
That doesn't really capture the nuance of the debate because
alongside the mechanics were components of the argument that involved
philosophy and even theology. But the main point of contention
as it related to du Chatelet's work, was that she
believed that Newton's manner of calculating vis viva multiplying mass
(23:48):
by velocity was not correct. She favored the Leibnitz calculation,
which multiplied mass by the square of velocity. Was the
secretary of the Royal Academy of Science ANSWS, so the
fact that he was openly debating a woman on matters
of science and philosophy. Was a very big deal. This
is sometimes pointed to as the first public scientific debate
(24:11):
between a man and a woman. Uh, there's a lot
of ancient history that might have included that that we
know about, so I'm reluctant to use those kinds of superlatives.
But it was a very big deal. It put to
Chedelais in a position where she had to defend her work,
knowing that all of the Royal Academy was following it,
and that a lot of people frankly thought she was
a heretic. But this also gave her a pretty significant
(24:33):
level of credibility. When she published the second edition of
her book in seventeen forty two, the debate with marn
was included in it, with the biting line from her
retort quote, I have read and reread your thesis and
cannot find anything different from what I've expounded. Maybe we
should define clearly what reading means. I love this too.
(24:55):
It's like hissing with a pens. Then German mathematician Johann
Samuel Koenig, who had tutored Emily beginning in seventeen thirty nine,
she was in Brussels on business at that time. He
accused her of plagiarizing his work when she was writing
Institution de Physique. There is evidence that early drafts of
(25:20):
her work contained the contested section, and she had written
those before he had come to teach her. But her
reputation really suffered just the same because of the accusations.
Any insight that her work might have included became clouded
over with this suspicion of intellectual theft. But despite all
of this, any of the negatives were outweighed by the
(25:42):
fact that Institution de Physique was very popular, and it
was translated into both German and Italian and published in
multiple editions. Because it kept selling out. Over time, the
romance between du Chatelet and Voltaire cooled, although the two
of them did remain close. The work of Sir Isaac
Newton would prove to be a particularly problematic topic for
(26:04):
the two of them. Emily easily understood the mathematical principles
involved in Newton's work and Voltaire really could not, And
when she explored ways to push Newton's work farther than
it had gone and then integrated into a larger philosophical system,
this created a double layer of insults for her beloved.
(26:27):
For one, Voltaire did not really grasp it and did
not like to feel foolish. And for another, he sort
of hero worships Sir Isaac Newton, so do Chafele suggesting
that there was anything lacking in the man's work really
irritated him. Although they no longer shared the romantic passion
that they had before, they remained very close and were
(26:48):
devoted to one another. Yeah, they still continued to live together.
So uh, there's an interesting passage. I didn't include it here,
but there was one moment whereas their relationship was breaking up.
In terms of a romance, she wrote something like, why
would a smart woman care if she's involved with someone
or not? Anyway, like this is nothing to me, I'm fine,
(27:09):
move on um. In seventy though, Emily de Chatelai found
romantic love once again, this time with the poet and
military officer Jean Flancois de Saint Lambert, who was ten
years younger than she was. In this affair led to
a significant problem because Emily got pregnant, and that is
a problem because as a forty two year old woman
(27:30):
in the seventeen forties, she understood that there was a
very real likelihood that she would not survive that pregnancy.
She and Voltaire continued to spend their time together while
she was pregnant. They shared a house just a few
blocks from the Tuler. Each of them had their own
suite there. Stal Lambert had apparently written to her saying
(27:51):
that he wanted her to come to Laura, where he
was stationed in military service at the time. But Emily
had a project that she prioritized over love, and that
was her translation and commentary on Newton's Prince Shipia. She
wanted to finish this work on Newton before the baby came,
because if the worst happened, her manuscript would be complete,
(28:14):
and she felt this really deep compulsion, something that she
described as a frightening need to finish it. And Emity
worked grueling hours according to a regiment that she established,
and she actually wrote this all out in letters to
her lover. She arose between eight and nine am and
went straight to writing. She would not stop until three pm.
(28:35):
Then she would take a break, have coffee and like
a snack, not really a meal, and then go right
back to working at four pm, which she did until
ten at night, and then she would have dinner and
spend time with Voltaire. She had a two hour block there.
She did not go to bed after that. Instead, she
would stay up to complete another block of writing from
midnight to five am before finally getting some sleep. She
(28:57):
had always been a little light on sleep throughout her life,
but this is really rough when you consider, like this
is third trimester behavior. And she herself noted that this
schedule quote required a mind and body of iron. And
when she had first determined she had to finish this
work before she had her baby, her schedule wasn't quite
as demanding, but as time wore on, she realized it
(29:18):
had to get demanding and it had to be an
all out effort or she was never going to make it.
Throughout the pregnancy, desate Lake continued to write to Jean
Francois de Saint Ambert, asserting how deeply she remained in
love with him. She talked about how her body was
in various pains from the pregnancy, but her heart retained
its vigor and caring for him, and she wanted him
(29:41):
with her because without him, she wrote quote, I see
only black. Emily de Chatelaer finished her translation and commentary
on Newton's Principia at the end of August seventy nine
in Luneville, at the home of the Duc de Lorne.
She had left Paris to give birth because she was
already a target of ridicule society. Gossips talked about how
(30:02):
absurdly stupid she was to have gotten pregnant by her
lover at the age of forty two, and even her
beloved friend and former paramor Voltaire, made jokes about the
baby being one of du Chatelet's quote miscellaneous works. On
September four, she had her baby. This was a daughter
named Stanislaus Adelaide, and the delivery, to everybody's surprise, seemed
(30:25):
like it had gone smoothly. It was considered a fairly
easy birth, but there was a complication afterward, and six
days later, after several days with a fever, Emily died
of a pulmonary embolism. Voltaire, San Lambert and her husband
Flauren Claude were all with her in her final moments.
The daughter she had given birth to died before she
(30:48):
reached the age of two. After Emily du Chatelet's death,
she was wildly misrepresented by the gossips of the day,
and though she had been incredibly forward thinking and way
ahead of her tone time, it became so absurd to
many people that a woman would have come up with
the ideas that she had, that they were attributed to men,
or they were simply discussed without much mention of attribution
(31:11):
to her work. Emmanuel Kant compared the idea of Emily
de Chatelat as a great thinker as being as absurd
as a woman with a beard. Man. Emmanuel Kant is
a jerk on so many levels of that statement. Because
of Voltaire's prominence, I meanly, Chatelet was largely relegated to
(31:32):
the role of his love interest rather than a collaborator
and driving force in his work. He was actually the
person who worked and lobbied assistants from other intellects of
the day to get her translation and commentaries on Newton's
Prince Shipia published. Voltaire even wrote an intro for it,
but it took ten years. It wasn't until seventeen fifty
(31:54):
nine that her translation and the additional writing the that
accompanied it came into print. That trans lation is still
used today because it is so good, and it was
the only French language version of it for a very
long time, and in it, dou Chatelat created ways to
describe and explain the many mathematical proofs that Newton had
(32:14):
used in ways that made them more accessible for readers.
As she had done with other concepts earlier in her life,
she was also able to draw more direct lines from
his work to the mechanisms of energy and gravity than
he had been able to do in his day, and
as a consequence, she kind of opened up the way
these ideas could be parsed and quantified for those who
follow her. Some of the most lauded work that came
(32:36):
after her was built on her commentary on Principia. Einstein's
theory of special relativity, for example, has been cited as
using a square to represent the speed of light. Because
of the groundwork that she laid in this publication. There's
also been a great deal more examination as to whether
Emily dou Chatelet was helping Voltaire right his elements of
(32:57):
Newton's philosophy, which was actually published two years before her work.
There was certainly a change in his work during his
years with du Chatlet, but whether it was because she
was dictating or simply inspiring him is still something of
a debate. Yeah, there are certain papers of hers that
are mixed in with his papers in various places that
(33:18):
people point to as evidence that really she was the
one that was kind of developing a lot of this stuff.
There is one rumor that he told someone that she
was basically dictating to him, but that's not substantiated. We
just don't know. I like the idea that they were
just driving each other intellectually to new places neither would
have gotten to on their own asked for Voltaire. Soon
(33:39):
after Emily's death, he moved to Berlin and then eventually
made his way to Switzerland, and it was there that
he wrote what is probably his most famous work, Candide,
in seventeen fifty nine. Incidentally, that work famously take shots
at the work of Leibniz, who do Chateaule both translated
and interpreted for her readers. Voltaire outlived du Chatelet by
twin nine years. He died in Paris in seventeen seventy eight.
(34:04):
After de Chatelet's death, the Serree Chateau passed through a
number of different hands in her family before it was sold.
Today it's privately owned, but it's also designated as a
historical monument. That's the status that's had since so much
of Emily deu Chatelet's life was about living outside the
boundaries that have been set by society as a woman
(34:25):
that I thought it would be good to close with
a quote from her, and this appeared in the preface
to the French version of Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees,
which she translated, and she wrote quote, I confess that
if I were king, I would get women to participate
in all the privileges of humanity, especially those of the mind.
It's as though women were born only to flirt, so
(34:45):
they are given nothing but that activity to exercise their minds.
The new education I propose would do all of humanity
a great deal of good. Women would be better off
for it, and men would gain a new source of competition.
I love her so much, um, I love all of
(35:07):
the uh, the just stories. When she was young and
she was like, I'll figure out a way around this problem.
I love the I'm gonna have a sword fight. That's
how we're going to get out of this jam. For
listener mail, I have an email from our listener Greg
because he wrote in to kind of help me with
(35:28):
my question that I asked in that episode about color deficiency,
uh and how certain things work for him. So he writes, Hi,
Tracy and Honley, I listened with interest to your podcast
on John Dalton and his descriptions of the world as
he saw it. I too have the common male red
green deficiency. But it was very clear in hearing his
descriptions that we see the world very differently. I can
(35:48):
see both green and red, but only some shades of
each are distinguishable by their color. Blue is blue, but
purple is pretty much blue too. I can only tell
one from the other if they are adjac in. The
purple is usually the one that is lighter in shade. Yes,
odd yellow is yellow, except when I find out that
it's actually a shade of green. To this day, I
(36:09):
truly don't know what color beige is. I'm laughing as
an aside because I'm like, you don't need to know.
It's not worth it. Um orange. Strangely, that one seems okay.
Where all this hits home is what you noted at
the end of your Behind the Scenes podcast, where confusion
ranging from annoyance to safety comes into play. The green
(36:29):
and yellow led indicators on electronic equipment are almost indistinguishable
for me, so their use as indicators of done versus
not done can be problematic. Worst traffic signal lights are red, yellow,
and white during the day. That's fine. At night, however,
the green light becomes hard to distinguish from nearby street lighting.
If I don't see the actual light change, I might
(36:50):
miss it. One of the most valuable apps that I
found for my smartphone is one which uses the camera
to descriptive lee and numerically describe the color that it
is seeing. Well, it does help in my daily life.
It does have its limits. To my wife's dismay, I
still cannot pick out the ripe bananas from the ones
that are just this side of wood. It is, however,
essential in sorting out the various flavors of Skittles, Reese's pieces,
(37:13):
and Eminem's technology has its place. Keep up the good work,
critic um. He writes, ps. I'm also left handed, while
not usually thought of a safety critical, try using a
skill saw at sometime with your other hand. Yeah, that
little button doesn't work. Ergonomics is a serious topic that
we shouldn't take so lightly. Um. I agree with that.
(37:33):
My my dad, who I mentioned in that behind the
scenes also left handed and was kind of forced to
use his right hand because of that, because his dad
was like, you will be able to use tools or
fire or rifle or do any of the things that
we need on the farm. We don't make you do this. Um,
thank you so much. Greg. It's it is really fascinating
to hear his version of it, right. Yeah, And I'm
(37:53):
also glad that you picked this one to read because
when I read it this morning, it reminded me of how, um,
when and the pandemic started and we all started wearing masks.
I bought an app on my phone called Hearing Helper,
which does live transcriptions of what you're saying for people
who might not be able to read your lips because
you have a mask on. So there are a lot
(38:16):
of accessibility things that are being approached through apps. Yeah,
apps bridge a lot of gaps that I didn't mean
to be quite so rhymy there, but it is true. Um,
it's an interesting thing. I know. I have seen also
some people making the masks that have the clear window
in them. Yeah, if you can make those that don't
fog up when people talk, it's gonna say, like, that's
(38:38):
the problem. Right, then you're obscured not by fabric, but
by like a wall of film as people exhale and
create a condensation blinder. Um, it's it's really really fair. Yeah,
don't worry about beige. You're not missing anything. Someone who
loves beige just got offended and I hope not. But
(38:58):
it's just one of those colors. And I'm like, I
of you would like to write to us and share
your thoughts on color blindness or how apps can help
us get across some divides. Uh, you are free to
do so. You can do that at History podcast at
iHeart radio dot com. You can also find us everywhere
on social media as Missed in History, and you can
subscribe to the show if you haven't already. That is
(39:20):
easy to do on the iHeart Radio app, at Apple Podcasts,
or wherever it is you listen. Stuff you Missed in
History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For
more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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