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Mentors, the Marquise Du Châtelet and Historical Memory Author(S): Judith P Mentors, the Marquise Du Châtelet and Historical Memory Author(s): Judith P. Zinsser Source: Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 61, No. 2 (May 22, 2007), pp. 89-108 Published by: The Royal Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20462616 . Accessed: 15/11/2013 10:27 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The Royal Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 75.102.94.107 on Fri, 15 Nov 2013 10:27:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions NOTES & RECORDS Notes Rec. R. Soc. (2007) 61, 89-108 -OF THE ROYAL doi: 10.1098/rsnr.2006.0174 SOCIETY Published online 27 March 2007 MENTORS, THE MARQUISE DU CHATELET AND HISTORICAL MEMORY by JUDITH P. ZINSSER* Department of History, Miami University, Upham Hall, 252 Oxford, OH 45056, USA When writing a biography, much has to be omitted to keep the life story focused and manageable for the reader. In La Dame d'Esprit: a biography of themarquise Du Chatelet the information about Emilie Du Chatelet's mentors seems, in retrospect, all too brief. This article therefore presents Maupertuis, Clairaut and Dortous de Mairan and describes their interactions with the marquise. It ends with speculations about why this exceptional philosophe is only now gaining the recognition she deserved as a member of France's eighteenth-centuryRepublic of Letters. Keywords: Emilie Du Chatelet; Dortous de Mairan; Fontenelle; Maupertuis; Clairaut; women's history Writing a biography means abandoning at least one-third of it:whole sections become just so many rejected pages, parts of files thatneed never be accessed again. To cut La Dame d'Esprit, my biography of Gabrielle Emilie leTonnelier de Breteuil, marquise Du Chatelet (figure 1), to a size thatwould not overwhelm readers proved particularly difficult.Each new decade of her life from her birth in 1706 to her premature death in 1749 had required more background research inFrench eighteenth-century social and intellectual history than I had ever expected. For example, after numerous edits, chapter one, 'The families: daughter and wife', retained only theessentials about hermany relatives and how they functioned in thehierarchies of Louis XIV's court; about the traditional education fora noble's daughter; about hermarriage contract and how it compared to others of a similar class; and about the ingenious ways inwhich the nobility managed their finances. Hard though it is to admit, what felt at times like butchery improved thebiography for the reader and kept the focus clearly on themarquise and her story. When it came to Du Chatelet's writings, the process was even more painful but with a similar result.Du Chatelet worked forprose thatwas simple, clear and concise; so must her biographer. Itmeant, however, that only a part of what I had learned to give context to her books and clandestine texts survived the final cuts; for example, about the controversies over theCartesian versus theNewtonian universe and theways inwhich physiciens (physicists) and geometres (mathematicians) combined aspects of each to explain the cosmos; about Du Chatelet's remarkablymodern understanding of space and time; about her 700-page heretical commentary on theBible; and about the composition of her discourse on personal happiness. *[email protected] 89 ? 2007 The Royal Society This content downloaded from 75.102.94.107 on Fri, 15 Nov 2013 10:27:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 90 J. P. Zinsser Figure 1. Portrait of themarquise Du Chfitelet byMarianne Loir, ca. 174 1. (Supplied courtesy of the collection of the Chaiteau de Breteuil, near Chevreuse, France, and reproduced with permission.) To make matters worse, thisbiography had a wider purpose: to counter all the half-scholarly, half-popular-romance versions of Du Ch'atelet' s history and to present a balanced and accurate lifeof this remarkable noblewoman who was recognized inher own timenot only because of her liaison with Voltaire-which every previous biography lingersover-but also because of her contemporary reputation as a natural philosopher and as the translatorof and commentator on Newton's Principia. Each paragraph seemed essential to counter yet another stereotype. Fortunately, wise editors knew that the reader caught up in themysteries and challenges of reconstructingthe history of thisunorthodox woman and herworks would go to thebibliography to seek the longer discussions of these issues in articles that I and other scholars had written. If ithad been appropriate tohave a much longerbiography-it is now a relativelymodest 293 pages-what would I have chosen to restore?Given thisopportunity to inaugurate a series on This content downloaded from 75.102.94.107 on Fri, 15 Nov 2013 10:27:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Mentors,the marquise Du Chateletand historicalmemory 91 .A.............. ..,. ...-. .............. -8^s,.1 . ....I... ~~~~... Figure 2. Du Chfitelet as she pictured herself for the frontispiece of her 1740 Institutions de physique. (Supplied courtesy of the collection of R. K. Smeltzer, and reproduced with permission.) life-writing for Notes and Records, what other stories do I wish to tell? Certainly, more information is called for about the ge'ome'tres and physiciens who contributed to her success. Their interactionswith themarquise Du Chatelet are part of the intellectualhistory of Europe, and the gendered evolution of modem science (figure 2). Next I would have added an extended discussion of how and why theaccomplishments of thisexceptional participant in thefirst half of theFrench Enlightenment could have been forgotten,especially when her intellectual and social This content downloaded from 75.102.94.107 on Fri, 15 Nov 2013 10:27:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 92 J.P. Zinsser Figure 3. Engraved portrait of Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis. (Copyright ?D The Royal Society.) peers accepted her as a genius, and after the publication of her Institutions de physique [Foundations of physics] in 1740 as a philosophe. For history's fascination is as much about the stories thathistorians have allowed us to forgetas those theyhave agreed to tell. THE MENTORS The most appealing and interesting of Du Cha'telet's mentors in the new mathematics and physics was Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (figure 3). He was 35 years old to her 27 This content downloaded from 75.102.94.107 on Fri, 15 Nov 2013 10:27:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Mentors, themarquise Du Chaitelet and historical memory 93 years in 1733, when she returned to Paris as a young married woman, and had probably already given lessons to her principal women friends, the duchesses de Saint-Pierre and d'Aiguillon. For Maupertuis, with money and the title thathis fatherhad earned as a Breton privateer successfully turnedmerchant and entrepreneur of the Atlantic trade, had taken readily to theworlds of the court and the salon. The elite of Paris appreciated his wit, his amiability, his talent formathematics lessons laced with gallantry.! He had been equally successful with themen of theRepublic of Letters. Having rejected themilitary career his father had arranged for him, he cultivated themembers of one of Paris's most prestigious caf6s, theGradot on the quai du Louvre. He and his friends, such as Charles Marie de La Condamine, the future leader of the expedition to equatorial South America tomeasure the curvature of the Earth, and their young friend, the mathematics prodigy, Alexis-Claude Clairaut, met at the cafe at about noon, and later in the evening after a play, the opera or dinner at one of the noble households they frequented.Maupertuis was so successful in this circle thatwhen the blind and aging librettistof Louis XIV's court, Antoine Houdar de la Motte, died in 1731, themathematician took his place and led the daily conversations. When Du Chatelet became Maupertuis's pupil, he had, in addition, already achieved the status of pensionnaire in geometry, the highest rank for a mathematician among the 42 paid members of the royal Academie des sciences. In his rise,Maupertuis was not atypical of this new learned scientific generation, themen whom Du Chatelet turned to for intellectual instruction and guidance. The average age of members of theAcademie des sciences in the 1720 and 1730s was 28 years. Few among them had a full-fledged university education and formal degrees. Instead, young men's families supported a few years at a college-Maupertuis attended theCollege de laMarche inParis and then arranged for introduction to a member. For example, on his return to Paris, Maupertuis became the protege of important members of the Academie des sciences including its perpetual secretary (executive director), Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle.2 Perhaps at Fontenelle's suggestion,Maupertuis chose mathematics as his specialty, although some historians have speculated that it had more to do with potential vacancies at the Academie thanwith a particular aptitude.3 However, the renowned Swiss geometre, Johann Bernoulli, with whom Maupertuis studied from September 1729 to July 1730, complimented the younger man to former pupils. Bernoulli wrote to a colleague in Paris at the end of Maupertuis's firstextended stay in July of 1730 about his pupil's 'extraordinary vivacity of mind, understanding things in half a word, and almost as many minutes that I employed hours to find'.4 He imagined that one day Maupertuis would be themaster and he the student.
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