Married at thirteen to Antoine Lavoisier, she asked him to teach her chemistry and became his associate: experiment notebooks, translations from English, and the plates of the Elementary Treatise on Chemistry, which she drew herself. After the scaffold of 1794, she published the unfinished memoirs.
The story
Born at Montbrison on 20 January 1758, Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze was married at thirteen to Antoine Lavoisier, a tax farmer like her father. When her husband's first work came under attack, in 1774, she asked him to teach her chemistry.
Trained by Bucquet, a collaborator of the couple, she became from 1777 a full partner: she kept the experiment notebooks, translated from English the publications her husband had to refute, and drew the plates of the Traité élémentaire de chimie herself. A private pupil of Jacques-Louis David, she knew how to make an assembly of glassware legible.
In 1794 she saw her father and her husband die on the scaffold. Ruined and briefly imprisoned, she recovered the manuscripts and brought out the unfinished Mémoires de chimie, the first edition of Lavoisier's posthumous work.
Remarried in 1805 to the physicist Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford — an American who had gone into the service of Bavaria — and separated four years later, she insisted on keeping the name Lavoisier until her death, in Paris, on 10 February 1836. Her salon had by then received the whole of learned Europe.
On site, do not miss
The epitaph, one of the longest in the sector — it names Lavoisier and Rumford — and the empty plinth where the bust is missing.
Visitors' questions
Where is Madame Lavoisier's grave at Père-Lachaise?
Division 13, along the chemin Méhul, second row. The grave of Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier (1758-1836) stands in an old quarter at the bottom of the cemetery: allow less than ten minutes on foot from the boulevard de Ménilmontant gate.
Étienne-Nicolas Méhul, Division 13Is Antoine Lavoisier buried at Père-Lachaise?
No. Guillotined in 1794, Antoine Lavoisier was thrown into a common grave and his body was never recovered. The grave in Division 13 is his wife's alone, which is why it is often taken for the chemist's cenotaph.
The tombs of absenceWhat did she actually contribute to chemistry?
Three attested contributions: translating the English publications her husband had to refute, keeping the laboratory notebooks, and engraving the plates for the Traité élémentaire de chimie of 1789, his Elements of Chemistry. After 1794 she saw the unfinished Mémoires de chimie into print.
Louis Joseph Gay-LussacWhat do you see at the grave today?
A plain monument, raised in the nineteenth century by her great-niece, carrying a long epitaph that names the two men of science in her life, Lavoisier and Rumford. The stone bust that once crowned it is gone.
Sophie Blanchard, the balloonist of Division 13Audio guide to Père Lachaise: the best unusual guided tour!
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