{"title":"Dear Jeanne,","authors":"Nina Rattner Gelbart","doi":"10.12987/yale/9780300252569.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300252569.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Mostly, I wonder what really happened once Bougainville left you and Philibert off on Isle de France. Did he desert you? Did he expose you? Or was your story perhaps not spread about, making it possible to remain in disguise as if nothing had happened and to continue as his manservant? Hard to believe you would have agreed to prolong such painful sartorial constraints. Yet given your zeal for science you might have, and even taken a new name, hiding in plain sight to accompany him on further adventures, like the trip to the volcano on Isle Bourbon. On the other hand, when he dedicated an interesting shrub to you he seemed nostalgic, writing that your plant name had significance “autrefois,” which suggests that you were in his past. But then what did you do? It was falsely reported that you married the owner of a forge on Isle de France; someone else spoke of your “personal papers” ending up in Strasbourg. Writers write the damnedest things....","PeriodicalId":269113,"journal":{"name":"Minerva's French Sisters","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122505747","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dear Madeleine Françoise,","authors":"N. Gelbart","doi":"10.12987/yale/9780300252569.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300252569.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Not long ago I sat under the cedar of Lebanon planted in 1734 by Bernard de Jussieu while you and everyone in the garden looked on. It is a huge, wide tree now, its lush needles and spreading branches providing welcome shade to visitors at the Jardin des Plantes as your beautiful park is now called. This gigantic evergreen, shaped like a little pyramid when you saw it but luxuriously broad and open now, outlived you and will long outlive me. Other trees planted centuries ago are still here too: I recognized an Acacia, grown from seed originating in my part of the world, North America, which was already here in your day, and there is the tall Sophora Japonica, transplanted in 1747 by Bernard de Jussieu, again while you all watched, from the Place Dauphine where it first took root. Next to the cedar is the Labyrinth, a tall hill with rows of hedges in rising circular paths that take you around and up to the gazebo at the top, one of the oldest metal constructions in the world built at Buffon’s orders and from which one can see all of Paris. I strolled through the majestic avenues of plane trees, for which we also have Buffon to thank, and enjoyed the famous banks of roses, irises, and peonies, picturing you bent over them as you sketched and painted. The Jardin Alpin, the materials for which were accumulated during your day, is now a secluded space for plants from mountain climates that you can only get to through a tunnel passage. The big old pistachio tree, grown out of seeds from China and still there, fascinated an earlier Jardin botanist, Sébastien Vaillant, who figured out—by observing its sterility until he mingled its flowers with those of another tree of the same species—that plants reproduce sexually just like animals. He was the first to introduce terms like male, female, and ovary into discussions of floral anatomy. This nomenclature initially created a scandal but was soon picked up by Linnaeus, whom you met in the garden in 1738 and for whom plant sexuality was central. He wrote and spoke freely about it with you and Bernard de Jussieu. It wasn’t shocking anymore....","PeriodicalId":269113,"journal":{"name":"Minerva's French Sisters","volume":"47 3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123185552","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Botany in the Field and in the Garden","authors":"N. Gelbart","doi":"10.12987/yale/9780300252569.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300252569.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter deals with two enthusiastic contributors to botany: field naturalist Jeanne Barret and botanical illustrator Madeleine Françoise Basseporte. The chapter notes that these intrepid women deliberately positioned themselves and thrived in their scientific work surrounded by some of the most celebrated naturalists of their day. It then introduces Bernard de Jussieu, generally revered as the “Newton of botany,” George Louis Leclerc, Compte de Buffon, director of the Jardin du Roi, and Louis Antoine de Bougainville who published a treatise on Newton's integral calculus. The chapter tracks how the forceful, tenacious women fashioned unprecedented plotlines for their lives, escaped circumscribed gender roles, and used their resulting freedom to investigate nature from the 1730s through the 1770s. Barret disguised herself as a man to work with botanist Philibert Commerson collecting flora during Bougainville's round-the-world voyage. Basseporte, on the other hand, enriched the work of Buffon and of Bernard de Jussieu by analyzing and depicting the parts of plants to discover the patterns and organizing principles of that science. Finally, the chapter chronicles Barret's and Basseporte's early lives before they came on the scientific scene.","PeriodicalId":269113,"journal":{"name":"Minerva's French Sisters","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134559677","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dear Marie-Marguerite,","authors":"N. Gelbart","doi":"10.12987/yale/9780300252569.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300252569.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"I visit your ghost in several places as I stroll around the 5th arrondissement. You had two addresses on the rue de l’Estrapade behind and south of what is now the Pantheon, the first on the corner of the rue des Poules, today rue Laromiguière—although there’s some ambiguity because the building adjoins the one next to it on the corner of the parallel rue Tournefort. Of course there is a plaque about Diderot having lived there, but no mention of you. The courtyards of those back-to-back buildings, where you did your experimental work in a glass enclosure, are filled now with trees and garbage can depots but back then that space was all yours. It was the scene of your hundreds of dissections, a research lab. Your neighbors evidently tolerated these unusual efforts, the constant traffic of bodies in and out, and the crowds lining up to see your exhibit. You must have had exceptional people skills to placate everyone around you, but they probably recognized the deep reverence with which you approached your work....","PeriodicalId":269113,"journal":{"name":"Minerva's French Sisters","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127451280","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mathematician and Philosopher","authors":"N. Gelbart","doi":"10.12987/yale/9780300252569.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300252569.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter traces the early life of mathematician and philosopher Elisabeth Ferrand. It documents her interest in the sciences from an early age as well as her accomplishment as a mathematician, in which she won the respect of various members of the Bernoulli dynasty in Basel. A professed Newtonian before Mme Du Châtelet, she had also been taught by her longtime friend Lévesque de Pouilly, who was readily acknowledged by Voltaire as the man who introduced Newton's thoughts into France. The chapter also discusses Ferrand's support for Newton and how she became an early believer in the law of attraction. In a portrait by Quentin de La Tour she chose to be depicted “meditating on Newton.” For Ferrand, as the chapter reveals, being a Newtonian meant appreciating elegant reasoning, understanding math and maybe even calculus (although this is not certain), accepting the law of attraction, and embracing an orderly, lawful view of nature. Ultimately, the chapter presents Ferrand's study, as an epistemologist, about human cognition by analyzing separately what each of the five senses contributed to it.","PeriodicalId":269113,"journal":{"name":"Minerva's French Sisters","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129721632","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dear Elisabeth,","authors":"N. Gelbart","doi":"10.12987/yale/9780300252569.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300252569.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"You seem to have lived and breathed math since girlhood, tutored first by a game theorist who would have taught you probability theory. Do you realize how fortunate you were to have had such an opportunity in your youth? How modern that was? Many young girls today are discouraged, by parents and teachers alike, from doing math and science because those are said to be difficult “masculine” fields. You were launched early, then known in 1733 as ...","PeriodicalId":269113,"journal":{"name":"Minerva's French Sisters","volume":"92 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133991635","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Chemist and Experimentalist","authors":"N. Gelbart","doi":"10.12987/yale/9780300252569.003.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300252569.003.0012","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter introduces chemist Marie Geneviève Charlotte Thiroux d'Arconville, who studied organic decomposition, echoing Newton's view, in Query #30 of the Opticks, that decay was a natural breakdown process in which substances were reduced to their component elements. The chapter then tracks her early life, in which she was born into a rich tax farmer family in 1720, and the rudimentary experiments she performed as a child. It also narrates her shift to intellectual pursuits after she contracted smallpox at twenty-two. Turning her energies to learning, d'Arconville taught herself languages starting with English and Italian, translating over the many next decades literary and scientific works that she admired, and publishing many original ones of her own on morality, history, fiction, and science. The chapter then presents the intellectuals with whom d'Arconville developed a close kinship: chemist Pierre-Joseph Macquer, doctor chemist François Paul Lyon Poulletier de la Salle, and surgeon Jean-Joseph Sue.","PeriodicalId":269113,"journal":{"name":"Minerva's French Sisters","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125544451","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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