Word: chatelet
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...everything they had seen and heard. One of them, arriving in broad daylight. claimed that he was led by a servant carrying a lantern through a succession of cavernous, shuttered rooms until a door opened into a brilliant drawing room lit by 20 candles. Here sat Emilie, Marquise du Chatelet, surrounded by scientific instruments and glittering "with diamonds like an operatic Venus." Above, "weaving spells" at the head of a secret staircase, sat "the Magician" who was Emilie's lover, the notorious M. de Voltaire. When a bell announced suppertime, the company gathered in a dining room devoid...
...Emilie du Chatelet was soft-eyed, handsome, highly sexed-and the mother of three children. She had a fluent knowledge of Latin, Italian and English -not Spanish, because someone had told her that "the only book in that language was frivolous," i.e., Don Quixote. Her scientific and mathematical knowledge surpassed Voltaire's. Together, they were destined to change intellectual history, Voltaire by championing Newton in France, Emilie by helping to open the border to the philosophy of Germany's Leibnitz. Voltaire was high-strung, always ailing, always in hot water with the authorities; Emilie was "strong...