  In 1738, she published “Lettre sur les ‘Eléments de la philosophie de Newton’” in the Journal des savants in which she argued against those who accepted a Cartesian account of attraction. In 1740 she published her Institutions de physique (The Foundations of Physics) ostensibly a textbook in physics for her son, but in reality a highly original work in natural philosophy (a second edition was published in 1742 under the slightly altered title Institutions physique). It was in this text—her magnum opus—that she supplied the metaphysical basis for the Newtonian physics she had long accepted. This metaphysics was Leibnizian and Wolffian in flavor. Her inclusion of a defense of force vive (she thus sided with Leibniz on this question) led to her subsequent dispute on the issue with Jean-Jacques Dortous de Mairan. Sometime in the early 1740s she began work on her two-volume translation of and commentary on Newton's Principia. She died shortly after she completed this work, which remained unpublished until 1759. It is still the leading French translation of Newton's book.