Serendipity, by Judith P. Zinsser

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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.

To be honest, however, this connection business is a lot more than just wondering if she had a hand in my good fortune. I remember sitting for hours at my numbered place at the heavy wooden tables for scholars in the archives at the Bibliothèque Nationale and realizing that Du Châtelet once might have been in the very same room when it was a private house. There was the smudged thumb print on a page of her writing that I never could find again. Another day, I noticed the page numbers of a table of contents she had made and realized that this proved she had already seen the proofs of the book. I found the contemporary review of her translation of Newton’s Principia, and her commentary, completely by accident. While standing in line at another Paris library, the Arsenal, I happened to glance down and saw an index for an eighteenth-century periodical. Few such indexes exist. So, I reached for it, just to pass the time, as it was from the period after she died. I’ll just look for “Du Châtelet,” and there was her name and the reference to the very review I was seeking, the proof that contemporaries knew she had been the author.

Was she just tapping me on the shoulder, impatient that it took me so long to see the obvious? Du Châtelet appears to have thought and written so quickly– she comments on it herself in her Institutions de physique [Foundations of Physics] when she’s talking about time– that some minds think so much faster than others. If she were watching, I must have seemed very slow to her indeed. I hope she never discovers that I almost failed physics as a senior in high school.

I am not the only biographer ever to feel a sense of connection with the subject of her book. For instance, other writers talk about dreams they had in which the person, imagined conversations, and so on. At my most frustrated, usually late at night after a long day of puzzling over my notes or my incomprehensible draft of a chapter, I would pass by a mirror and talk into it to Du Châtelet– probably a left over effect of multiple childhood readings of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-Glass. I am sane, and Du Châtelet never appeared or answered me. In fact, I have to admit that in those moments I envied the novelists who say that once they create their characters, the plot takes care of itself. I think a biography is just the opposite. The plot is not the hard part, it’s “creating the character” that’s the challenge. For, writing a biography of a person has a big psychological component. You are, after all trying to understand the mind, emotions and actions of another human being. And Du Châtelet left so many questions about why she did what she did. Why take Voltaire as a lover when he was of a lower class and thus, a disgraceful choice according to her fancy courtier relatives? How could she learn calculus and why would she want to when only about twenty people in all of Europe could deal with it? What did she plan for the next phase of her life after the birth of her illegitimate child and the publication of “my Newton,” as she called it? My speculations on that last question fill the “Epilogue” of the biography. I still wonder about the new country house she was in the process of refurbishing. I assume her husband sold it. However, I know that guessing at answers can lead to big mistakes.

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Judith P. Zinsser, Emilie du Chatelet, history, philosophy, Enlightenment, Voltaire, Newton, France, Paris, Penguin Books, books