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Somewhere people got the idea that history is "true," and that all a historian has to do is string one "true fact" after another. Actually, we construct it like a puzzle, and sometimes we put pieces in the wrong place. They look right, but are not. That sense of connection with your subject can lead you into this kind of mistake if you're a biographer. You try to make allowances for another time and place, but inevitably, your time and place become intertwined. You only hope that this doesn't distort the history you're trying to tell.

As a feminist, I wanted to make this unorthodox woman a champion for her sex. Du Châtelet certainly acted as a feminist might, challenging the intellectual authorities of her day; insisting that they read her writings on the nature of fire, on metaphysics, on the Bible, on morality, and that they judge them as they would those of a man. I could hear my stepmother asserting: "I pride myself that I think like a man." Barbara Lewis Zinsser was one of three women in her law school class at Columbia University, and always insisted that she didn't understand what the feminists of the 1970s were talking about. So, I thought I understood that part of Du Châtelet's attitudes. I, too, as an admirer of my lawyer stepmother, had once believed "you think like a man," the highest praise one could receive as an intelligent woman. When I remembered that, I avoided forcing Du Châtelet into a twentieth-century feminist mold. This eighteenth-century genius did acknowledge that her successes proved women's capabilities, but she met the challenges for herself, not for all women.

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Yes, a bit like “Twilight Zone,” I know, but there was a point at which recreating her life became “a mission,” my task. I even worried at times, that like my aunt, Gretel Zinsser Munroe, I might die before I finished. But serendipity took care of all that. I met people who were experts on subjects when I hadn’t a clue, for example, about integral calculus. A woman in California, created a web site featuring Du Châtelet and passed on questioners to me. That’s how a retired engineer from Brittany, looking for information about an eighteenth-century relative of his, came to unravel the contradictory stories about Du Châtelet’s first love affair. He put me onto the book about the palace of Versailles that I had only hoped existed. Just in the course of conversation over lunch, a young historian mentioned the military archives at the chateau of Vincennes in Paris. That’s how I found out so much about Du Châtelet’s husband, usually dismissed in a sentence or two in other accounts of her life. At a conference on the Enlightenment, I found out about the web site on eighteenth-century games so that I could describe one of her favorites, cavagnole. A chance meeting in England led to introductions to descendants of her and her husband’s families, and to the editor of the London Royal Society’s Notes and Transactions who asked me to review the new book by I. Bernard Cohen, the big Newton scholar who assumed that a man wrote Du Châtelet’s commentary on the Principia, Newton’s most famous work. At times it seemed as if the marquise had taken charge of insuring my scholarly reputation as well as the completion of her own biography.

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My great aunt wrote biographies and even made a living at it, Book of the Month Club and everything. When I would ask her why she chose the subjects she did, she always looked at me as if I were silly. “Why, of course,” she would say, “because they were bright, interesting men.” Women, to her, though perhaps bright, could not be as interesting because they never had power, in the sense she admired it. So Catherine Drinker Bowen wrote best-selling biographies of John Adams, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sir Edward Coke, and the authors of the US Constitution. Only at the end of her writing life did she turn to men who were not quite such “models of probity,” as she would have said, to Sir Francis Bacon and Benjamin Franklin, both of whom had a relatively harmless, but scandalous side. Was she really a lawyer or a politician at heart? A judge? Born when she was, and into a family of four brothers and a renowned beauty for a sister, she never even went to college. She always told me that her mother introduced her to guests and visitors differently from the other children: “and this is my daughter who plays the violin.” So, I guess that’s as close as I’ll come to understanding why these men appealed to her.

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Judith P. Zinsser is our guest blogger during the week of December 10th. If you have any questions for Judith P. Zinsser, add a comment to any of her posts. Here is some brief information about Emilie du Chatelet: Daring Genius of the Enlightenment:

Although today she is best known for her fifteen-year liaison with Voltaire, Gabrielle Emilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise Du Châtelet (1706–1749) was more than a great man’s mistress. After marrying a marquis at the age of eighteen, she proceeded to fulfill the prescribed—and delightfully frivolous—role of a French noblewoman of her time. But she also challenged it, conducting a highly visible affair with a commoner, writing philosophical works, and translating Newton’s Principia while pregnant by a younger lover. With the sweep of Galileo’s Daughter, Emilie Du Châtelet captures the charm, glamour, and brilliance of this magnetic woman.

About Judith Zinsser

Judith P. Zinsser is co-author of the landmark two-volume history of European women, A History of Their Own, and teaches at Miami University in Ohio. A recognized expert on the Marquise Du Châtelet, she was featured in October on the PBS Nova special Einstein’s Big Idea.