CHATELET, GABRIELLE-EMILIE LE TONNELIER DE BRETEUIL, ...

born Dec. 17, 1706, Paris, France died Sept. 10, 1749, Lunville French mathematician and physicist who was the mistress of Voltaire. She was married at 19 to the Marquis Florent du Chtelet, governor of Semur-en-Auxois, with whom she had three children. The marquis then took up a military career and thereafter saw his wife only infrequently. Mme du Chtelet returned to Paris and its dazzling social life in 1730 and had several lovers before entering into an affair and intellectual alliance with Voltaire in 1733. She was able to extricate the intemperate Voltaire from many personal and political difficulties, such as those that followed the publication of his Lettres philosophiques in 1734. To avoid an arrest warrant, Voltaire left Paris in June of that year, taking refuge in Mme du Chtelet's chteau at Cirey in Champagne. In this haven they pursued their writing and philosophical and scientific discussions. In 1738 Mme du Chtelet and Voltaire competed independently for a prize offered by the Academy of Sciences for an essay on the nature of fire. Although the prize was won by the German mathematician Leonhard Euler, Mme du Chtelet's Dissertation sur la nature et la propagation du feu was published in 1744 at the Academy's expense. She wrote several other scientific treatises and many posthumously published works on philosophy and religion. Voltaire and Mme du Chtelet continued to live together even after she began an affair with the poet Jean-Franois de Saint-Lambert; and when she died in childbirth at the court of Stanislas Leszczynski, Duke of Lorraine, these men and her husband were with her. From 1745 until her death she had worked unceasingly on the translation of Sir Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica. It was published in part, with a preface by Voltaire and under the direction of the French mathematician Alexis-Claude Clairaut, in 1756. The entire work appeared in 1759 and was for many years the only French translation of the Principia. The many hundreds of letters that passed between Mme du Chtelet and Voltaire are assumed to have been destroyed, but some were included in Voltaire's Correspondance, 24 vol. (195357). Additional reading Works on Chtelet's life and intellectual collaboration with Voltaire include Ira D. Wade, Voltaire and Madame du Chtelet (1941, reissued 1967); Nancy Mitford, Voltaire in Love (1957, reissued 1985); and Samuel Edwards, The Divine Mistress (1970).