Geneviève Thiroux d'Arconville
| Marie-Geneviève-Charlotte Thiroux d'Arconville | |
|---|---|
|
Portrait of Mademoiselle Darlus by Charles-Antoine Coypel, 1735. | |
| Born |
17 October 1720 Paris |
| Died |
23 December 1805 Paris |
| Nationality | French |
| Fields | Chemistry |
| Known for | chemical study of putrefaction |
| Influences | Pierre-Joseph Macquer, Antoine de Jussieu |
| Influenced | Antoine-François Fourcroy |
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Marie Geneviève Charlotte Thiroux d'Arconville (née Darlus, also known as la présidente Thiroux d’Arconville and Geneviève Thiroux d'Arconville) was a French author and chemist.[1]
Biography
Daughter of the rich tax-farmer André-Guillaume Darlus, Geneviève married Louis-Lazare Thiroux d'Arconville, counsel at the parlement of Paris (later president of the chambre des enquêtes, hence her honorific la presidente) when she was fourteen years old.
At twenty-three years old Thiroux d'Arconville contracted smallpox, which scarred her for life. Thenceforth she shied away from public spectacle, embraced austere Jansenist morals and dedicated her life to study.
Thiroux d'Arconville's interests included history, physics, chemistry, natural history and even medicine. She took classes in anatomy at the Jardin du Roi where a few women were admitted.
She wrote and translated works on diverse subjects[2] but they were invariably published anonymously in her lifetime.
Works
Essays
- De l’Amitié, 1761, in-8°. (On Friendship)
- Traité des passions, 1764, in-8°. (Treatise on the Passions)
- Essai pour servir à l'histoire de la putréfaction, 1766, in-8°. (Essay on putrefaction)
- Histoire de mon enfance.
- Méditations sur les tombeaux. (Meditations on tombs)
- Mélanges de littérature, de morale et de physique, 1775.
- Pensées et réflexions morales sur divers sujets, 1760, 2nd end 1766, in-12.
- Sur moi.
- Traité d’ostéologie, in-fol.
Translations
- Avis d’un Père à sa Fille, 1756, in-12. Translated from the English of George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax.
- Leçons de chimie, 1759, in-4. Translation of Peter Shaw's Chemical Lectures (London: Longman, 2nd edn, 1755).
- Romans traduits de l'anglois, 1761. Includes excerpts translated from George Lyttelton's Letters from a Persian in England and Aphra Behn's Agnes de Castro.
- Mémoires de Mademoiselle de Falcourt.
- Amynthon et Thérèse
- Mélanges de Poésies Anglaises, traduits en français, 1764, in-12.
External links
References
- ↑ Samia I. Spencer, ed. (2005). Writers of the French Enlightenment. Detroit: Thomson Gale. ISBN 0787681326.
- ↑ Bernier, Girou Swiderski, Marc Andre, Marie-Laure (2016). Madame d'Arconville, moraliste et chimiste au siècle des Lumières: Etudes et textes inédits. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. ISBN 978-0-7294-1172-1.
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