Book description
The meeting of Voltaire, successful financier, famous poet and
troublemaker, and the enchanting amateur physicist and countess Ã
milie du Châtelet, was a meeting of both hearts and minds. In the
Château de Cirey, the two brilliant intellects scandalised the French
aristocracy with their passionate love affair and provoked revolutions
both political and scientific with their groundbreaking work in
literature, philosophy and physics.
Nancy Mitford's account of the love affair of the Enlightenment is,
in the author's own words, 'a shriek from beginning to end'.
Nancy Mitford was born in London on November 28 1904, daughter of the
second Baron Redesdale, and the eldest of six girls. Her sisters
included Lady Diana Mosley; Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire and Jessica,
who immortalised the Mitford family in her autobiography
Hons and Rebels
. The Mitford sisters came of age during the Roaring Twenties and
wartime in London, and were well known for their beauty, upper-class
bohemianism or political allegiances. Nancy contributed columns to
The Lady
and the Sunday Times, as well as writing a series of popular novels
including The
Pursuit of Love
and
Love in a Cold Climate
, which detailed the high-society affairs of the six Radlett sisters.
While working in London during the Blitz, Nancy met and fell in love
with Gaston Palewski, General de Gaulle's chief of staff, and eventually
moved to Paris to be near him. In the 1950s she began writing historical
biographies - her life of Louis XIV,
The Sun King
, became an international bestseller. Nancy completed her last book,
Frederick the Great
, before she died of Hodgkin's disease on 30 June 1973.
