Albert Ein­stein pas­sion­ate­ly wooed his first wife Mil­e­va Mar­ic, against his family’s wish­es, and the two had a tur­bu­lent but intel­lec­tu­al­ly rich rela­tion­ship that they record­ed for pos­ter­i­ty in their let­ters. While the con­tro­ver­sy over Mar­ic’s influ­ence on Ein­stein’s the­o­ries raged among aca­d­e­mics and view­ers of PBS’s con­tro­ver­sial doc­u­men­tary, Einstein’s Wife, a scan­dalous per­son­al item in the let­ters got much bet­ter press. Lists of Note tran­scribes them from Wal­ter Isaacson’s biog­ra­phy Ein­stein: His Life and Uni­verse:CONDITIONSA. Although Ein­stein tried to pre­serve the mar­riage, once they sep­a­rat­ed for good, he did not lament Mil­e­va’s loss for long. Einstein’s per­son­al fail­ings might pass by with­out much com­ment if he had not, like his hero Gand­hi, been ele­vat­ed to the sta­tus of a “sec­u­lar saint.”