Yes, we could talk about Voltaire cutting his way through any Comedie Francais actress that wasn't nailed down, but I'd rather talk about his two more steady relationships - with the great Emilie du Chatelet and the okay Madame Denis.

Chatelet is one of my favorite figures in history, period. She died young, at 42, and in that time managed to produce a translation of Newton's Principia which remains a standard, AND discover what we now know about an object's kinetic energy, namely that it is proportional to the square of the velocity. She was a steady advocate of women's education, a critical analyst of the Bible, and just generally awesome.

Madame Denis was Voltaire's niece, and was some 18 years younger than he. Her contemporaries didn't have anything particularly great to say about her, finding her vain, nagging, and extravagant in spending other people's money, but her presence during Voltaire's final years gave him the space he needed to write some of his greatest works and pursue the revision of the French justice system, and he wasn't necessarily always a peach to live with himself, so let's call it a draw.

- Count Dolby von Luckner