#HerBook

I have just put together a new list of French books and one of the highlights is two books from the library of the eighteenth-century experimental chemist, Geneviève Thiroux d’Arconville (1720–1805): her own copies, each bound in contemporary red morocco, of her translation of the Marquis of Halifax’s The Lady’s New Year’s Gift, or, Advice to a Daughter (1688) and a collection of translations comprising the Duke of Buckingham’s Essay upon Poetry (1682), Pope’s Temple of Fame (1714), and Prior’s ‘Henry and Emma, a poem, upon the model of The Nut-brown Maid’ (1709). The Halifax was her first book.

Each book bears her striking bookplate, ‘engraved for her by Louise Le Daulceur [fl.1750–69], one of the few women in this line of art, … showing Minerva, goddess of wisdom, craft, and war, helmeted and holding a sword and shield, floating on some clouds near two volumes by d’Arconville’s favourite poets at the time, Milton and Tasso’ (Gelbart, p. 219).

Some background: ‘Marie Geneviève Charlotte Darlus was born into a rich tax farmer family in 1720, a smart, eager, and restless girl.  Her mother died when she was only four, but her father, André Guillaume Darlus, a resourceful fellow whose talents had made possible his remarkable rise, seems to have been a warm and kind man to whom she was quite attached.  Distraught after his wife’s death, however, he failed to give his daughter the education she so craved.  As she explained in the memoirs she dictated at the end of her life, she had only her little sister, whom she adored yet who had little stimulation to offer, for company.  “I had no books to read, and was born with a very lively head and imagination.  I was reduced to raising myself, without help, without advice …  I was completely ignorant” …

‘Young Mlle Darlus actually asked to marry early and escape her life that numbed and saddened her for another, unknown but perhaps more interesting and eventful.  Receiving a huge dowry of 350,000 livres, in 1735 at age fourteen, she wed the even wealthier landowner and magistrate Louis-Lazare Thiroux d’Arconville, eight years older than she and on his way to becoming a president of the parlement of Paris.  Within the next four years and while still a teenager she gave birth to an heir, a spare, and a third son for good measure, the family then spending much of each year in the chateau of the village of Crosne [on the Seine just south of Paris], which her father purchased after the birth of her children and where one could travel easily by river coach.  The extensive grounds included a park and a floral garden that Darlus opened to the public, and the chateau, surrounded by a moat, was immense.  It was on the ground floor of this residence that Mme d’Arconville would later construct her chemistry laboratory.

‘At twenty-two she contracted smallpox, narrowly escaping death but left so scarred both physically and emotionally that she made a radical change in her life, withdrawing from society as much as possible given the demands of her social station and turning instead to intellectual pursuits …  Turning her energies now instead to learning—“I was at least twenty years old when I began my education; how much time had been lost”—d’Arconville taught herself languages starting with English and Italian, translating over the next many decades literary and scientific works which she admired [including Alexander Monro’s Anatomy of the Human Bones, 1741, and Peter Shaw’s Chemical Lectures, 1734] and publishing many original ones of her own on morality, history, fiction, and of course science.  Her command of these diverse realms was breathtaking’ (Gelbart, pp. 213–4).

‘Translation was (and is) not the passive activity we might mistakenly tend to consider it.  Especially for eighteenth-century women, it was a way of participating in the intellectual life of the day, and a few of them actually shaped the dissemination of ideas, blurring the lines between themselves and the author, altering, shortening, expanding, and judging their material.  Mme Du Châtelet had done so in her translation of and commentary on Newton’s Principia, a partial edition of which was published posthumously in 1756.  D’Arconville may well have been familiar with this work, and she too is exceptionally aggressive in this regard, appending “para-texts” to all of her translations, introductions, prefaces, preliminary discourses, “avertissement,” afterwords, and other front and back matter that framed them, as well as numerous critical notes within the text itself.  She also took liberties with the actual words.  For example, in her first translation, the Halifax book, she explained: “I thought myself obliged to change and even suppress sometimes certain portions of my original; some because they were so contrary to our ways that they would have been shocking, and others because the expressions used by the author could not pass into our language without becoming completely ridiculous.  I flatter myself that my changes and omissions will be approved.  With the exception of the passages just mentioned, I try to render my translation as faithfully as possible.”  D’Arconville, like Du Châtelet, adopted an almost editorial approach to modification and what she deemed to be improvement of the texts on which she worked’ (op. cit., p. 220).

For a full account of d’Arconville, see Nina Rattner Gelbart, Minerva’s French Sisters: Women of Science in Enlightenment France, Yale UP, 2021, ch. 5 (pp. 212–255).