Work · Empiricism, Enlightenment & Liberalism
Discourse on Happiness
Happiness needs passions, illusions and study – advice for a woman without power over the world. Published posthumously in 1779.
Introduction
Du Châtelet probably wrote this short essay in the mid-1740s; it circulated privately and was printed only in 1779, thirty years after her death. Its advice is practical: to be happy one must be free of prejudice, be virtuous, keep one’s health, have tastes and passions, and remain open to illusions. The most personal passages concern love, which she treats as the greatest source of happiness and the hardest to keep, and the love of study, which she recommends to women because, shut out from public glory, they need a passion that depends on themselves alone. Readers have long connected the text with her relationship with Voltaire.
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