Seduced by Logic

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Tags: UQP, winter-2011

Seduced by Logic by Robyn Arianrhod

An edited excerpt from Seduced by Logic, published by UQP

Emilie’s story begins more than 300 years ago, contemporaneously with the birth of mathematical physics itself.

She was born Gabrielle-Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, on 17 December 1706, just 19 years after the first publication of Newton’s magnificent Principia. She was the daughter of the chief of protocol at Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles, and she would marry into the prestigious Du Chatelet family.

Voltaire would later refer to her playfully as “Madame Newton du Chatelet”, but she was far from a stereotypically staid female mathematician: aristocratic, sparkling with diamonds, adorned with silk and down “pompoms” or other trinkets.

She was as scandalous in her sex life as she was extravagant in her manner of dressing (Voltaire sometimes called her “Madame Newton-Pompom-du Chatelet”).

She had a “temperament of fire”, as she put it, a temperament that enabled her to live the aristocratic life to the full: at her chateau at Cirey-sur-Blaise, she could dance and sing entire operas all night long, and at the royal court at Versailles, she was a notorious gambler at cards.

She felt that in both gambling and love, risking high stakes was a way of feeling fully alive.

There is very little reliable historical information about Emilie’s childhood, although there are often-repeated tales of her prowess at riding and sword-fighting, and of her early preference for books over traditional “female” interests.

Certainly the adult Emilie was a fine horsewoman, and she combined both the discipline and rationality of her mother, Gabrielle-Anne de Froulay, and the passion and recklessness of her father, Louis Nicolas Le Tonnelier de Breteuil.

Robyn Arianrhod, UQP, RRP $34.95

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