Love is but a beautiful equation

Love is but a beautiful equation: Correspondences of Professor Euler and his unknown affair

The following is an excerpt from the recently uncovered manuscript at Ghent about the preeminent Swiss mathematician from his memoir "La vie est une grande constant" hitherto unpublished.

Dear Henrietta,

Perhaps my undying love - tempest toss'd like a precious life of temple-haunting martlet - shall forever be unrequited. You are the only person who knows of my past - the buried first born by the yew tree.

Forever yours,

L. Euler

Monsieur Euler,

Cette une grande domage! I urge you and strongly beg you to forego this foolish endeavor. You have a wife and children and I will be married by coming autumn. Under no sidereal velocity shall these twain meet. For what it is worth, I have finally completed my habillitationschrifft on molecular chemistry along with conjectures of Monsieur D'Alembert.

Till the cherished friendship passes away to the wisp of dawn,

H. Kuhlenbech

Dear Henrietta,

Mon amour... yes, you are rightfully within your bounds to disapprove this approach. But please understand it was not just the rejection the paper on constant based on Vieta's formula that was by Royal Society of Fellows, nor perish of my own infant at my own hand that caused my crumbling, crushing demise - rather...rather it is your unbegotten warmth and the comfort of your presence - the comfiture which no Icarus may incur from the such halation! - is what turned me into a Gorgonian stone - a blasphemous one that of with horns - forever trapped in a diorama of frozen entombment.

L. Euler

Monsieur Euler,

Monsieur! Monsieur! Please cease this temptation. Please do take comfort in the fact that it was nothing you could have done to prevent such tragedy. It was well without your range and in the grand scheme and machinery of Providence, there are but no errors. But monsieur, please I do beg of you. Some notions in life must always be left unreconciled - such as Beatrice and Dante. But monsieur as I vociferously drew your attention in that Sunday tryst at Le Parisienne, you must absolve yourself of your sins and beg Christ and our Lord Savior for mercy, forgiveness, and exculpation. As you know Pope Pius II himself had an unwholesome affair and wrestled with it.. but I digress.

My daughter is growing up fast. Hypatia. Alors monsieur! As you suggested per sex - which I obliged and previously undisclosed! - she is named after the Greek prodigy and as her mother, I cannot be any more proud of her - our - precocious daughter.

And I insist and beg of you and yes, mon cheri, I would happily genuflect to you if I were there like Le Parisienne not to whisper to a soul about that oak box in the yew tree.

On a pleasant note, I am thrilled to announce I have received a personal autographed edition of Monsieur Linnaues chancing upon his tome at a Delft bookstore.

H. K

Mon amie,

It must be easier to say than act to forgive oneself for murdering his own son.

L. Euler, Geneve 1754

Mademoiselle Kuhlenbech,

Madamoiselle, you have probably received all my previous five correspondences and I comprehend by your silence, and lack of any response thereof, that you have severed this fragile, gossamer umbilical cord of a relationship which you previously deemed as "not wholesome".

I wish you all the best and hopefully your marriage will be a resplendent one by Jove.

Yours,

Leonard

Henrietta,

I beg of you to reply. S'il vous plait, you must - you must! You must! You must!! You must give me one last chance to explain myself and express my undying love for you. And I do not care an ounce about that 'batard' - that magistrate- that filthy pig... that swine of a creature you call a husband.

You once mentioned that upon giving the dollop of syrup from the apothecary for the chest-ache I tried my best to come to aid in Marcus's most suffocating moment of his life. But you never factored into the equation, whitherto, it was my own subconscious that must have done the deed to wash the stain of the past like a Macbethian stigmata.

My love - yes my dear - I murdered our own son. And I pity you, you wretched whore and wench, to appear so blase in disposition. I spit your image and I pity you. You are no mother... and as much it pains my I can never see the fair face of Hypatia, that she is under the tutelage of the most monstrous and treacherous Jezebel in the world - rivalling a heinous, murderous tricoteuse - the worst of the worst subterranean chthonic vermin Xanthippe.

I hope you suffer in the lowest pits of hell as foretold in Psalms.

L. Euler

Monsieur Euler,

I cannot respond to any of your correspondences any more. I beg of you to stop sending these dispatches which are piling up as crumpled leaves in the wagon that the "batard" - the magistrate has borrowed to dispose of all our personal accoutrements and furniture to the pyre of eternity.

Please, monsieur, please admit yourself in a sanatorium. Your wife and children need your precocious power of the will to perform at the most optimum function. If you truly love me, you must do so for my and your own good.

Hypatia has just reached thirteen and loves her father dearly.

Henrietta K. Arnaud

Mademoiselle Arnaud,

If you shall burn my penned pieces - yes, from the pang of my chest- then it shall forever be lost to ether and I must divulge the truth.

For as you know, nothing a geometer or algebraist chases more than the veridical truth of the Infinite Universe. Corollary I must confess that it was no accident that on that wretched winter Sunday of November, full well being cognizant of the fact that Marcus is averse to Arachis hypogaea, I crushed the powder of peanuts into the syrup from the apothecary. Does it make me a heinous man and a father? Does it mean history shall forever be locked out of the secret that I, yes, I, Monsieur Leonard Euler, erased away the footprint of my affairs? Yes… unless a soul eyedrops on this very letter you are holding.

But you should not have proceeded with the smuggling of the infant in a chest under the gingham for nine consecutive days. And yes, if that damned magistrate did chance upon this letter, then as God as my witness, he shall know - and so shall the world- how you were equally complicit in murdering our very own son.

And if it must solace your cockles of your heart, I am doing infinitely better now having found a strange discrepancy that alludes to a connection between theta and imaginary number i for the most sublimely, beautiful equation ever known to mankind.

Yours faithfully,

Leonard Euler