What brought Émilie to the Champagne?
Here is a copy of the video text.
Hello, this is Cheryl Sawyer, the author of the Victor Constant Investigations, set in France during the Enlightenment. A unique character who acts as a consultant detective in these crime novels is the real-life, amazing Émilie du Châtelet.
You can see here the spectacular place where I first met her: the ancestral chateau of the Breteuil family, which is southwest of Paris. Many years ago, I worked there for the Marquis and Marquise de Breteuil.
One day I was admiring a portrait in the Breteuils’ private salon and I asked the marquise: ‘Who is the beautiful woman in that painting?’ The marquise explained that she was Émilie du Châtelet, a member of the Breteuil family, who was famous in her time as a mathematician and physicist. It turned out that Émilie was also notorious, for openly living and working with the even more notorious free-thinker, Voltaire.
I had never read any of Émilie’s work and I was excited to find out more about her. What was she like? Here is the present Marquis de Breteuil standing under the priceless portrait, which is now displayed in the rooms dedicated to Émilie.
In fact the marquis believes that another portrait of Émilie in blue, a copy of which hangs in the same rooms, is likely to be the most accurate. The original was painted in 1745 when Émilie was 39. It’s easy to guess from it her passionate and forthright nature, her lofty intelligence and her sense of humour.
Émilie was clever, vivacious, witty, high-born and highly educated. As a child, living in Paris, where her father was the Receiver of Ambassadors at the court of France, she was admired by family friends as a prodigy, excelling in music, languages, mathematics, and natural philosophy, as science was called at the time.
Émilie was married at the age of nineteen to the Marquis du Châtelet. The prestige of his family was a match for hers. As Marquise du Châtelet she had privileges at Versailles and was allowed to be seated in the presence of the Queen, with whom she often played cards—for large sums of money.
Then in 1733 Émilie met Voltaire—at the opera, as it happens—and everything changed. They became lovers, and the delights of Paris suddenly seemed inadequate, for both of them. Voltaire, a poet, dramatist and philosopher, was constantly in trouble over his controversial books, while Émilie had an aristocratic position to maintain and was married with two children. Nonetheless, they dreamed of living and writing together.
Émilie tackled a mountain of study in the fields where she was determined to make her mark: mathematics and physics. Voltaire paid for her to be tutored by a friend: Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, one of the foremost geometers in Europe and a member of the French Academy of Sciences.
In 1734 Émilie and Voltaire were in Burgundy for a wedding at the Château de Montjeu, which you see here, and disaster struck—a warrant was issued by King Louis XV for Voltaire’s arrest and he had to go into hiding. He might have fled to Switzerland, but instead, Émilie offered him a secret refuge in the remote Champagne region.
This hiding place was her family’s Château of Cirey, which was used as a hunting lodge. I’ll never forget my first visit there, where I was kindly welcomed by the present owner, the Comtesse de Salignac-Fénelon. This is the place where Émilie & Voltaire finally established a haven together. This is where she wrote all her works on mathematics and physics—works that are recognised today for their brilliance, originality and lasting importance.
I chose Cirey as the first setting for Murder at Cirey, the début novel in the Victor Constant Investigations series. On the very day when Émilie comes to live with Voltaire in 1735, Voltaire discovers a young man has been shot dead in the Cirey woods. How will Émilie cope with the danger and scandal of a murder on her estate? To find out, go to Amazon for Murder at Cirey.
