The meeting of Voltaire, successful financier, famous poet and troublemaker, and the enchanting amateur physicist and countess milie du Ch telet, was a meeting of both hearts and minds. In the Ch teau 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'.