Excerpt from An Eighteenth Century Marquise: A Study of Emilie Du Ch telet and Her Times None of the famous women of the day was more essentially a product of its artificiality than the Marquise da Chatelet. Her mind was deeply tinged with the philosophical and metaphysical ideas which accompanied the approach of the mental unrest preceding the Revola tion. She was thinker and scientist, pr cz'euse and pedant, but none the less a coquette - in short, a woman of T contradictions. She was so strikingly original, so marked i in her individuality, that she was worthy to be judged on 2 her own merits, and to stand alone in the eyes of posterity, yet historians have persisted in regarding her merely as a satellite of Voltaire. This she would assuredly have resented. She would rather have been well hated than treated with indifference, and would have preferred to zabe written of with contempt rather than to be ignored. Fibut this she would never have confessed. She desired to be loved for herself alone, and when told that certain persons refused to do her justice, she replied that if this were indeed the case she wished to ignore it. Jealousy was at the root of much of the dislike which her women friends lavished upon her, and occasionally expressed openly. It is significant that, according to. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.