the-daily-cosmos:

Voltaire and Emilie in Castle Cirey

God behaves like a strange king who wanted to test the obedience of his subjects on ridiculous things, and who punished them afterward well beyond their crimes.

If only Adam and Eve had been punished, one could strive to save the conduct of God from the reproach of malignity and injustice.

But it is claimed that the entire race of men was cursed for this mistake, and that we all carry the burden of Adam’s sin, a burden that is no less than our eternal damnation. 

- Émilie du Châtelet

 In the frontispiece to Voltaire’s interpretation of Isaac Newton’s work, Elémens de la philosophie de Neuton (1738), the philosophe sits translating the inspired work of Newton. Voltaire’s manuscript is illuminated by seemingly divine light coming from Newton himself, reflected down to Voltaire by a muse, representing Voltaire’s lover Émilie du Châtelet—who actually translated Newton and collaborated with Voltaire to make sense of Newton’s work.

tiny-librarian:

The first, Emilie du Chatelet, was a woman cut to a superhuman scale. “A genius in virtually every realm of mathematics,” she outsmarted the leading male scholars of her day. In addition, she looked like a celebrity model, loved like a Lotharia, and lived like a sultana. “The wench,” said a Romeo of the age, “is formidable.” “The most brilliant member of her sex in Europe,” she was also a “passionate,” magisterial siren who captured and held the two beaux du jour of Paris, the duc de Richelieu and Voltaire.

Seductress: Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love

This woman is my hero.