Newton and the Counterfeiter (13 page)

The letter to Pepys suggests that Newton was lucid enough to recognize his own distress and to assign reasons for it. But three days later, he sent another letter, to John Locke, that bespeaks true paranoia: "Being of the opinion that you endeavoured to embroil me wth woemen," Newton wrote, "& by other means, I was so much affected with it that when one told me you were sickly & would not live I answered twere better if you were dead."

A month later, however, Newton wrote again to Locke, as if in acknowledgment of—and apology for—a temporary derangement. "The last winter by sleeping too often by my fire," he wrote, "I got an ill habit of sleeping & a distemper wch ... put me further out of order." Thus, "when I wrote to you I had not slept an hour a night for a fortnight together & for 5 nights together not a wink." He seemed to be asking forgiveness, though for what he was not sure: "I remember I wrote to you," Newton confessed, but what he had said, "I remember not."

In the meantime, scholars on the Continent had begun to pick up hints that something was wrong, and the gossip mills inflated the disaster. Rumor reached Christiaan Huygens that Newton had lost more than a year to what was called frenzy, a condition attributed both to overwork and to a fire that was supposed to have destroyed Newton's laboratory and a portion of his papers. Huygens told Leibniz, and Leibniz talked to his friends. With each telling, Newton deteriorated, until by 1695, Johann Sturm, a professor at the University of Altdorf, reported back to an English correspondent the story of the fire, now so enlarged as to consume not just a shed and some notes, but Newton's house, library, and all his worldly possessions. Sturm described what seems to have been the Continental consensus: the greatest natural philosopher of the age had become "so disturbed in mind thereupon, as to be reduced to very ill circumstances."

The fire seems to have been a pure invention, a nicely mechanical cause to explain how the author of the
Principia
could descend into a delirium so consuming that (again, in rumor) he failed to recognize his own book. But even if his intellectual rivals leapt a little too eagerly to the conclusion that the giant in their midst had fallen, the fact of Newton's collapse remains.

What had actually happened? Newton's derangement was certainly connected, by time, place, and emotional logic, to the fate of his alchemical investigation. But there was another element in the mix, one that Newton never discussed: the end of his nearest approximation to romantic love.

A wealth of myth has sprung up around Newton's emotional life, and the possible existence of a sexual one. He was an irascible man, a great hater. Hooke and Leibniz were only the most famous of those he detested. He did not make friends easily, especially as a young man, and seemed not to mind the resulting solitude. He was not much of a joiner. He never married. Without doubt, he was a prude. Hence the legend of the bloodless semidivine hero of the mind—as Halley put it, of the figure whom "nearer the gods no mortal may approach."

But for all such adulation then and since, the real Newton was a human being, capable of great feeling—affection as well as enmity, loyalty as well as implacable disdain. At least once in his life he demonstrated that he could go so far as to feel a bond with another person stronger than mere friendship. That man was a young Swiss mathematician, Nicholas Fatio de Duillier.

Fatio, then just twenty-five years old, probably met Newton at a Royal Society meeting on June 12, 1689, at which Huygens was scheduled to speak. Newton had come to hear the man who was his nearest intellectual equal, and at some point in the course of the evening he was introduced to the younger man.

They got on from the start. Less than a month after the Royal Society encounter, Fatio joined Huygens to accompany Newton to Hampton Court to seek King William's patronage for the Englishman who had written the
Principia.
The expedition came to nothing, but the fact that Fatio was included in the company was a measure of how much pleasure his company gave Newton.

There was much to like. An undated portrait shows a handsome, even striking young man with large, luminous eyes and a flirtatious half smile. He was more than a mere beauty, however. He was enough of a mathematician to catch at least one error in the
Principia,
and apparently considered editing a second edition of the book himself. He was just wise enough not to overplay his hand. As he admitted to Huygens, for all of his pride in catching a mistake or two in the great work, "I was frozen stiff when I saw what Mr. Newton has accomplished."

Even better, he was a born disciple. Early in their acquaintance,
Newton, having only just returned to Cambridge, wrote to Fatio of his plans to go back up to London to see him. Fatio replied, "I had a design to go see you at Cambridge; but you send me word you will come hither, which I am very glad of." More than glad, it turned out, for Fatio was trying in his own way to emulate his hero, going so far as to attempt a new interpretation of Newton's conception of the mutual attraction between bodies: "My Theory of Gravity," Fatio wrote, "is now I think clear of objections and I can doubt little but that is the true one." But who is he to say so, when the master is at hand? "You may better judge when you see it," Fatio told Newton, with all due deference. (In fact, another of Newton's friends, the mathematician David Gregory, reported, "M
^r
Newton and M
^r
Hally laugh at M
^r
Fatios manner of explaining gravity.") He declared himself not only Newton's "most humble and most obedient Servant," but one who was "with all my heart" devoted to Newton's service.

Newton was smitten. After the summer of 1689, he made sure that on his next visit to London, he took rooms in the same house with Fatio. The two stayed together for as much as a month in March 1690, Fatio acting as Newton's secretary, transcribing revisions to the
Principia.
Already, less than a year into their acquaintance, Newton devoted more time to the company of a single person than he had ever done before or would do again.

That first, intense involvement ended fairly quickly. Fatio returned to the Netherlands, and Huygens in June. He stayed away for fifteen months. With distance between them, he seems to have withdrawn from the pull of Newton's attention—at least, Newton complained in a note to Locke that Fatio had remained silent for months.

Nonetheless, when Fatio returned to England in September 1691, Newton immediately traveled up to London. Over the next year and a half, the two men remained in regular contact, when Newton came to the capital and at least once when he received Fatio in his rooms in Cambridge. They still talked natural philosophy, but the relationship and its overt focus shifted. Newton began to honor Fatio with secrets he revealed only to Boyle and Locke and perhaps a few others. In the clearest expression of the value he placed on this one young man, he opened his most intimate thoughts, enlisting Fatio as his alchemical acolyte.

Throughout the early 1690s, Fatio eagerly followed his mentor into the secret corners of the Newtonian cosmos. Newton composed his last version of
Index Chemicus
and then
Praxis
during the years of his most intense affection for Fatio, and both were probably at least partly intended to be personalized texts, composed for a beloved disciple by the first and greatest truly quantitative alchemist in history.

Few details survive of Fatio's own alchemical research, but in the spring of 1693, he sent Newton an account of an experiment with mercury for use in a reaction with gold. The report reflects Newton's insistence on sound laboratory procedure. Fatio specified the instruments used: "a wooden mortar that hath a pestill allmost so big as to fill exactly the mortar"; he notes the efforts to reduce impurities in the preparation; he describes as exactly as possible the sequence of events as the mixture changes color and sprouts "a heap of trees out of the matter."

This was flattery by imitation. Fatio did the same across the range of Newtonian passions—besides his dabbling in alchemy and his rather feckless attempt to make sense of gravity, he followed Newton into scriptural exegesis, writing about the interpretation of prophecy, the temptation of Adam and "the serpent being there the Roman Empire." Such earnest prose on Newton's subjects, all in echoes of Newton's own rhythm and voice! It is a familiar spectacle, an ancient one: a comely, talented youth craving the attention and submitting to the loving instruction of an older, powerful man.

***

It did not last.

Fatio wavered first. He fell ill in the autumn of 1692, and painted a dire picture for Newton: "I have Sir allmost no hopes of seeing you again," he wrote. He had picked up a terrible cold on his last visit to Cambridge, and it had settled in his lungs. Disaster followed disaster—something that felt like the rupture of an ulcer in his lungs, a fever, deepening mental confusion. This could really be the end, Fatio warned, though he admitted he had not yet seen a doctor, who "may save my life." Should the worst happen, a friend "will acquaint you with what may befall me."

Newton replied in a frenzy of advice and sympathy. On September 21, he wrote, "I ... received your letter wth wch how much I was affected I cannot express." He gave orders: "Pray procure ye advice & assistance of Physitians before it be too late." No excuses were permitted: "if you want any money I will supply you." All this, "with my prayers for your recovery" from "your most affectionate and faithfull friend to serve you."

Fatio wrote again the next day, acknowledging his friend's concern: "I give You Sir my most humble thanks again, both for your prayers," he wrote, "and for your kindness to me." Apparently his earlier report had been a false alarm, an eruption of Fatio's gift for self-dramatization. But there seemed to be another reason for his shift in tone, now not only markedly less urgent than Newton's but with none of the ardor of the eager early days of their friendship. Fatio was polite, even graceful, and signed off as his friend's "most humble, most obedient and most obliged Servant." But that was simply the conventional formula, more polite than felt.

Newton caught the shift. For the only time on record, he acknowledged dependence, fear, a kind of desire. He began to beg. He suggested that London's evil air might be damaging his friend's health. The solution: come to Cambridge, "so to promote your recovery & save charges till you can recover I [am] very desirious you should return hither." Newton offered money, a home, care, whatever it took to secure the health—and favor—of his companion. Fatio resisted all temptation, but left Newton with a hint of hope. He wrote back that he had decided to return to Switzerland, inquiring coolly, "I should be glad Sr to know whether your occasions will possibly bring you to London before I go away."

But then he intimated that he might yet return to England, and if he did, he could settle in Cambridge. "If You wish I should go there," Fatio wrote, "I am ready to do so"—having, he added, other reasons for such a move than merely saving money. Newton took heart from that show of willingness, and accepted the news of Fatio's impending travels relatively calmly. "I must be content to want your good company, at least for some time," he said, taking his leave "wth all fidelity" until they could meet again.

There the exchange rested. The two traded a few letters about minor matters, a box of rulers Fatio had left behind, some books, and so on. Newton continued to press for a reunion in Cambridge, and Fatio continued to alternate suggestions that he might come to his friend with an always formidable propensity for self-absorption. (He wrote, for example, of his plan to undergo an operation for hemorrhoids, "to be free of an excrescence ... very troublesome to me.")

Then, abruptly, Fatio announced a change of plans. In May, five months after he first hinted that he might settle with or near Newton, he announced that he had made "new acquaintance ... a good and upright man." This new friend was another alchemist, an expert in the creation of mercury compounds. Fatio wrote that this adept could cure consumption with a potion "which he giveth for nothing." So, he assured Newton, there was no need to worry about his health anymore, for that good man would care for him without charge. "I have not now any need of money Sir, nor of your powders, but I thank you kindly for both."

Just in case Newton missed the point, Fatio wrote again of his new friend's marvelous remedy, announced his own plan to study medicine, so as to be able to sell the potion himself—and then had the boldness to suggest that Newton might want to partner with him in the enterprise. There was no mention of Cambridge, nor of rooms to be taken side by side, nor of the alchemical work that master and disciple could undertake. Fatio did allow that were Newton to come to London, he would be happy to see him. Failing such a meeting, he retained "all manner of respect" for the man to whom he had formerly pledged the whole of his heart.

To this, Newton had no reply. The next known document in his own hand is the one he abandoned on the question "
Quid
..." "What?"

Was Newton's heart broken? Maybe. Certainly, there is no parallel in the rest of his long life for the urgency he allowed himself to reveal in his letters to Fatio. His panic at the hint he might lose the object of that affection had no precedent either. Newton was more accustomed to dismissing men from his acquaintance than pursuing them.

Were Fatio and Newton lovers? No one knows. Probably not, if the rest of Newton's life is any guide. Except for his exchanges with Fatio himself—always written in the perfectly respectable terms with which men expressed affection then—there is nothing that can be seen as a love letter anywhere in his correspondence. The only more or less explicit traces of erotic longing Newton admitted throughout his life appear in his catalogue of sins as a young man. Along with lying about a louse to allowing his mind to wander during chapel to harboring murderous thoughts about his mother, he admits to "having uncleane thoughts words and actions and dreamses" and turning to "unlawful means to bring us out of distresses."