La dame d'esprit: a biography of the Marquise Du Châtelet

Gabrielle Emilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise Du Chatelet (1706—1749), might be best known for her unorthodox fifteen-year liaison with Vohaire, but she was much more than the patron, mistress, and intellectual companion of France's most famous poet and playwright. In the first decades of the French Enlightenment, although barred from even the most informal gatherings of learned men because of her sex, she wrote on the ideas of English moral philosophers and deists and on the nature of fire, light, and the cosmos itself. Her translation of Isaac Newton's Principia remains the authoritative French version to this day and her commentary on this mammoth classic demonstrated her mastery of the new calculus, a skill shared by only a dozen or so others in 1740s Europe. She even devised her own academy at her family country chateau and attracted the leading mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers of the day. Ultimately, Du Chatelet gained recognition as a genius from the members of Europe's Republic of Letters in her lifetime.