Germaine de Staël Quotes
When men do wrong, it is out of hardness; when women do wrong, it is out of weakness.
Staël, Madame de. Corinne; or, Italy. Translated by Isabel Hill, Richard Bentley, 1833.
Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Chatelet, 1706-1749 was a great French Physicist & Mathematician at a time when females rarely knew anything of these subjects. She was the first scientist to predict infra-red radiation and she translated Newton’s Calculus into French and at the same time developed some new proofs. Perhaps her greatest achievement was her discovery and proof that the energy of a moving object was not proportional to its velocity as had been claimed by Newton and all other scientists of the say. She showed them that it was proportional to the square of the velocity. She was a bit of a libertine and had an affair with Voltaire among others. Tragically, she died in childbirth at the age of only 43.
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein, commonly known as Madame de Staël), was a French woman of letters and political theorist, the daughter of banker and French finance minister Jacques Necker and Suzanne Curchod, a leading salonnière. She was a voice of moderation in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era up to the French Restoration. She was present at the Estates General of 1789 and at the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Her intellectual collaboration with Benjamin Constant between 1794 and 1810 made them one of the most celebrated intellectual couples of their time.
