Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier

Her father, Jacques Paulze, worked primarily as a parliamentary lawyer and financier. Most of his income came from running the Ferme Générale (the General Farm) which was a private consortium of financiers who paid the French monarchy for the privilege of collecting certain taxes. Her mother, Claudine Thoynet Paulze, died in 1761, leaving behind Marie-Anne, then aged 3, and two sons. After her mother's death Paulze was placed in a convent where she received her formal education. At the age of thirteen, Paulze received a marriage proposal from the 50-year-old Count d'Amerval. Jacques Paulze tried to object to the union, but received threats about losing his job with the Ferme Générale. To indirectly thwart the marriage, Jacques Paulze made an offer to one of his colleagues to ask for his daughter's hand instead. This colleague was Antoine Lavoisier, a French nobleman and scientist. Lavoisier accepted the proposition, and he and Marie-Anne were married on 16 December 1771. Lavoisier was about 28, while Marie-Anne was about 13. By the time he had met the widowed Anne-Marie Lavoisier, he had become one of the most well-known physicists at the time. However, the marriage between the two was difficult and short-lived; they separated after three years. Paulze insisted throughout her life that she retain her first husband's last name, demonstrating her undying devotion to him. Rumford had moved to Paris where he continued his work until his death in 1814. He was buried at Auteuil, Paris. Marie died very suddenly in her home in Paris on 10 February 1836, at the age of 78. She is buried in the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise in Paris. ==Contributions to chemistry==

Paulze assisted Lavoisier in the lab during the day, making entries in lab notebooks and sketching diagrams of his experimental designs. The training she had received from the painter Jacques-Louis David allowed her to accurately and precisely draw experimental apparatuses, which ultimately helped many of Lavoisier's contemporaries understand his methods and results. She also translated works by Joseph Priestley, Henry Cavendish, and others for Lavoisier's personal use. This was an invaluable service to Lavoisier, who relied on Paulze's translation of foreign works to keep abreast of current developments in chemistry. In the case of phlogiston, it was Paulze's translation that convinced him the idea was incorrect, ultimately leading to his studies of combustion and his discovery of oxygen gas. , Paris Paulze was also instrumental in the 1789 publication of Lavoisier's groundbreaking Elementary Treatise on Chemistry, which presented a unified view of chemistry as a field. This work proved pivotal in the progression of chemistry, as it presented the idea of conservation of mass as well as a list of elements and a new system for chemical nomenclature. Paulze contributed thirteen drawings that showed all the laboratory instrumentation and equipment used by the Lavoisiers in their experiments. She also kept strict records of the procedures followed, lending validity to the findings Lavoisier published. Before her death, Paulze was able to recover nearly all of Lavoisier's notebooks and chemical apparatuses, most of which survive in a collection at Cornell University, the largest of its kind outside of Europe. The year she died, a book was published showing that Marie-Anne had a rich theological library with books which included versions of The Bible, St. Augustine's Confessions, Jacques Saurin's Discours sur la Bible, Pierre Nicole's Essais de Morale, Blaise Pascal's Lettres provinciales, Louis Bourdaloue's Sermons, Thomas à Kempis's De Imitatione Christi, etc. == Artistic training and contributions ==

's Traité Élémentaire de Chimie, Wellcome Collection Paulze began receiving artistic instruction from the painter Jacques-Louis David in late 1785 or early 1786. Not long after, probably sometime in 1787, David painted a full-length double portrait of Paulze and her husband, foregrounding the former. Paulze's artistic training enabled her not only to document and illustrate her husband's experiments and publications (she even depicted herself as a participant in two drawings of her husband's experiments) but also to paint a portrait of Benjamin Franklin, one of the many scientific thinkers she hosted in her salons. Later, Paulze's ties with David were severed due to the radical politics of the latter in the context of the French Revolution. ==References==