Voltaire Almighty A Life in Pursuit of Freedom

"Voltaire's personal life was as colorful as his intellectual life. Of independent means and mind, he never married, but he had long-term affairs with two women: The first was Emilie Chatelet, his intellectual equal. A renowned scientist married to a French bureaucrat, she died while giving birth to yet another man's child. The second, Mary Louise Denis, his niece, twenty years his junior, remained with her esteemed uncle for the last two decades of his life." "The consummate outsider, a dissenter who craved acceptance while flamboyantly disdaining it, author of countless stories, poems, books, plays, treatises, and tracts as well as some twenty thousand letters to his friends: Voltaire had a long and active life, all for the cause of freedom - his own and others'."--BOOK JACKET.