The Fevers of Reason by Gerald Weissmann

Author:Gerald Weissmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781942658337
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Published: 2018-01-29T05:00:00+00:00

ANTOINE-LAURENT LAVOISIER AND HIS WIFE, Marie-Anne, are depicted in the most beautiful image of scientific coworkers ever put on canvas. Jacques-Louis David’s 1788 portrait of this unusual couple is not only an image of Enlightenment grace and grandeur but also a document of a work in progress for which both of the principals are responsible—the revolutionary Traité élémentaire de chimie of 1789. It justifies the later appellations of Lavoisier as the father and Mme Lavoisier the mother of modern chemistry.

Lavoisier is shown with quill on paper, looking up at his wife as if to take dictation or suggestion. The instruments on the table and floor are those used by Lavoisier to give “the first accurate accounts of burning, respiration and rusting.” Mme Lavoisier is depicted with her arm on her husband’s shoulder, and the stand behind her could well contain drawings for some of the thirteen plates she fashioned for the Traité de chimie. Lavoisier’s mid-script attention to his wife reminds me of her important translation of Richard Kirwan’s treatise on the presumed substance “phlogiston”. Her modest smile directed at the viewer—and the portraitist—suggests a strong student–teacher bond. Marie-Anne was an apt pupil of David: her skillful student drawings, with David’s comments, are in the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris today.

The painting also documents a concurrence of three revolutions: the American, the French, and the Chemical. It is set in the Arsenal of Paris, to which Lavoisier had been appointed as commissioner of the Royal Gunpowder and Saltpeter Administration. His charge, so to speak, was to greatly improve the purity and efficacy of French explosives. He fulfilled this task admirably: in aid of his American friends, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, he guaranteed the colonists a trusty supply of neat gunpowder to fight the redcoats. Indeed, Franklin was a good friend of both Lavoisiers. Recovering from an attack of gout in Philadelphia, Franklin wrote to Marie-Anne in 1783 to thank her for a portrait she had painted of him for its “great merit as a picture in every respect; but what particularly endears it to me, is the hand who drew it.” He was only one of Marie-Anne’s many admirers, who included Gouverneur Morris, Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, and Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford. As Roald Hoffmann lamented, “There is no biography of Mme Lavosier. I think she deserves an opera.”

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