Essay
Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds
Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes
Synopsis
Over several evenings spent in the garden, a philosopher introduces a curious and witty marquise to the new astronomy. He shows her that the Earth turns on itself and around the Sun, then that the Moon might be another Earth, inhabited; he reviews Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, before suggesting that the fixed stars are so many suns, each lighting a world. The marquise's objections guide the lesson, which mixes science, gallantry and irony.
Context
Published without the author's name in 1686 by the widow Blageart, the book at first had five evenings; a sixth, added in 1687, reviewed recent discoveries. Written in French for fashionable society rather than in learned Latin, it spread the ideas of Copernicus and the physics of Descartes, while inviting distrust of appearances and of authority. It went through thirty-three editions in the author's lifetime, the last, in 1742, regarded as definitive, and it was placed on the Index as early as 1687. Aphra Behn translated it into English in 1688.
Who it is for
To discover how science became an elegant conversation, at the dawn of the Enlightenment.
Prizes and reception
Translated into more than ten languages, it remains today its author's best-known book.