Marie Geneviève Charlotte Thiroux d'Arconville (née Darlus, also known as la présidente Thiroux d’Arconville and Geneviève Thiroux d'Arconville) (17 October 1720 – 23 December 1805), was a French novelist, translator and chemist who is known for her study on putrefaction. She discussed her study on putrefaction in her Essay on the History of Putrefaction in 1766.
Early life
Marie-Geneviève-Charlotte Thiroux d'Arconville was born Marie-Geneviève-Charlotte Darlus to Françoise Gaudicher and Guillaume Darlus on 17 October 1720. Her father was a tax farmer or farmer-general; they collected taxes for the state and usually kept some for themselves. Thiroux d'Arconville's mother died when she was four and her education was left in the hands of multiple governesses. As a young child, she enjoyed sculpture and art however when she learned to write at age eight, writing books became a new interest. She told friends later in life that she hardly had an idea without a pen in her hand.
Marriage and early adult life
At fourteen years old, Thiroux d'Arconville requested to be married to Louis Lazare Thiroux d'Arconville, a tax farmer who later became a president in the Parliament of Paris, a regional justice court. She is an anomaly in that most women during this time period didn't request to be married. The two were married on 28 February 1735. Together the couple had three sons. As a married woman, Thiroux d'Arconville enjoyed theater and opera, similar to many wealthy women. She reportedly saw Voltaire’s Mérope fifteen times in a row. However, when she was 22, Thiroux d'Arconville suffered from a case of smallpox that left her badly scarred. After this experience she withdrew from society and spent her time studying and focusing on religion.
Thiroux d'Arconville studied English and Italian at her home and attended science classes at Jardin des Plantes, the Kings’s Garden in Paris and a center of medical education that was founded in 1626 by King Louis XIII. She also often gathered well-known scientists in her home. The Garden offered courses on physics, anatomy, botany and chemistry to both men and women. It is thought that Thiroux d'Arconville took both anatomy and chemistry classes. Similar to many aristocratic women of the time, Thiroux d'Arconville also collected rare plants and stones. While she enjoyed these activities, she wanted to learn more so she set up a laboratory in her home and stocked it with chemistry equipment. She also ordered books from Bibliothèque nationale de France, the national library of France. Initially Thiroux d'Arconville worked as a botanist, she sent specimens to Jardin des Plantes. Eventually she turned to chemistry and started working under the guidance of Pierre Macquer, a professor of chemistry and pharmacology at the Garden.
Women had long been a part of the literary community in France; critics thought this indicative of the advanced French society. Scholars viewed the idea of the "woman writer" as a sign of modernity and women in society were aware of the large body of work written by female scholars; in this sense, Thiroux d'Arconville was not an anomaly. However, because of her disfiguration, she chose to withdraw from the social space of the French salons, and establish herself in the research laboratory instead.
Career as a translator
Early translations
Thiroux d'Arconville's desire for learning and her love for British culture inspired her to begin translating various English works, on a variety of subjects, to French. Translating works was not uncommon for women during this time period; it was a way for women to engage in scholarship. Thiroux d'Arconville often added commentary to the works she translated; however she did not put her name on these texts. As a woman scholar during this time, she faced restrictions and gender-based expectations. In her work Sur les femmes, she wrote about women "Do they show science or wit? If their works are bad, they are jeered at; if they are good, they are taken from them, and they are left only with ridicule for letting themselves be called authors".
It has been said that Thiroux d'Arconville suffered from insomnia and worked on multiple projects at a time to prevent herself from growing bored. The first text she published was Advice from a Father to his Daughter in 1756. Advice from a Father to his Daughter was a translation of a text on morality written by George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax. In the preface of the translation Thiroux d'Arconville discussed how unqualified governesses often raised daughters because mothers did not want to raise them.