From Behind the Folding Screen to the Collège de France: Victorine de Chastenay’s Privacy Dynamics for Knowledge in the Making

Abstract

This chapter is an examination of Victorine de Chastenay’s manuscripts through the lens of private practices of knowledge production. Victorine de Chastenay, mostly known for her Mémoires and a few translations, was raised in ancient French aristocracy and received an exceptional education for a nineteenth-century woman. Throughout her life, she explored various fields of knowledge, such as literature, poetry, languages, history, politics, botany, mathematics, and astronomy. Her manuscripts and parts of her Mémoires offer an insight into her private practices of knowledge in the making. This contribution focuses on the learning and writing techniques she used as a child and, later on, in her domestic space. As a noblewoman, the social norms of her time forced her to study in dedicated spaces at dedicated times, sometimes hidden behind a folding screen. Chastenay’s manuscripts reveal her economy of knowledge in the making, highlighting the necessity of a room of her own. This study combines material, spatial, social, and emotional approaches to analyse her private knowledge production.

Text translated by Robert Fyke (Doctoral student, EHESS/CAK/ Cermes3—Paris). This research was made possible by the support of Centre Alexandre Koyré and Cermes3 (Paris). Images appear courtesy of the Archives départementales de la Côte d’or (Dijon) where I benefited from the invaluable advice of Cécile Robin. It is a pleasure to thank Natacha Klein Kafer and Natália da Silva Perez for their precious insights about privacy. I am also deeply grateful to Jelena Bakic for her constructive remarks and numerous reading tips. The precious research and comments of Gilles André, Marc Philippe and Cécile Robin from the EMAN team were invaluable. The writing of this article would not have been possible without the constant support of Jeanne Peiffer during my research. At last, my thanks go to Robert Fyke who translated my text in the light of his mastery of epistemology.

During the eighteenth century in France, a certain number of women, most often from socially elevated positions, practised science for their amusement and/or their passion.¹ Since they did not have to contribute to a family scientific practice, they were seldom focused on publication (either anonymously or as acknowledged authors) and thus could remain perpetual students. One of these women left a rich corpus of handwritten documents stretching from just before the French Revolution until the second Empire. This corpus displays the strategies and practices put in place by some women of this period, like Émilie Du Châtelet (1706–1749) or Geneviève Thiroux d’Arconville (1720–1805), to access knowledge-strategies sometimes also used by men.² Louise Marie Victoire de Chastenay de Lenty, also known as Victorine de Chastenay (1771–1855), is a character well known by historians who study the Consulate, the Empire, and the Restoration, but not for her involvement with scientific knowledges.³ Indeed, her posthumous Mémoires have been read as an important testimonial concerning the nobility and court life during the changing political regimes of her lifetime, but have not yet been used to advance the history of scientific knowledges.⁴

Chastenay is perhaps better known in literature for having translated Ann Radcliffe’s archetypal Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho from English in 1797.⁵ Nonetheless, Chastenay was not only dedicated to poetry and literature. She also broadly explored sciences—including astronomy, chemistry, physics, and mathematics—that were considered masculine endeavours.⁶ Chastenay represents a perfect example of the encyclopedic savante from the French Age of Enlightenment: a woman who was equally comfortable with writing poetry or historical narratives, reading Cicero or Voltaire, translating English novels or botanical observations, and conducting experiments on plant germination or writing up a summary of a geometry course.⁷ It is this little-known portrait of Chastenay that will be sketched here from the many scientific manuscripts she has left behind, as well as from the insights provided by her Mémoires.⁸

The wealth of ego documents she left behind from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century reveals a wide range of knowledge practices most women could not access.⁹ These practices often remained private and poorly documented because these women (much like their male counterparts) seldom became scientific authors. From a social and material point of view, these sources also reveal the use and regulation of Chastenay’s private life and space related to a means of constructing knowledges that respected the social norms of her time.¹⁰

In this chapter, I will first describe details from Victorine de Chastenay’s childhood that laid the foundations for her knowledge practices. Both from individual learning and from presentations of what she had learned from family and friends, Chastenay confronted the social and gender norms that she would have to cope with all her life in order to become a learned and respected woman. Here knowledge acquisition, gender, and context are interwoven. Next, the chapter will pay attention to Chastenay’s intense focus on scientific activities beginning in 1800, when she developed new private practices of knowledge-making. This focus also shows how knowledge production, private life, and privacy more broadly, became intertwined in modifying the spatial arrangement of her home to comply with nineteenth-century rules of sociability, such as French étiquette defining ways of hosting. Chastenay’s archives highlight not only the evolution of material demarcations to her privacy during the day, based on balancing her visitors and her work schedule, but also highlight the variety of knowledges she mobilized: gestures, observations, intellectual constructions, material products, or emotional analyses. Finally, I will show how Chastenay’s private writing practices nourished public exchanges with savants. Chastenay shared her views and learning with both selected and larger audiences in institutional places such as the laboratories of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, or the lecture halls of the Collège de France in Paris.

Note-Taking and Knowledge Acquisition as Private Practices

Coming from an ancient family of the noblesse d’épée fallen on harder economic times, Victorine de Chastenay was educated in an enlightened intellectual milieu. Her father, Erard Louis Guy, Comte de Chastenay de Lenty (1748–1830), oversaw a salon graced by a succession of important savants. He profited from this patronage by learning English, Italian, and Latin; and he benefited from science courses. His wife, Catherine Louise d’Herbouville (ca. 1750–1830), was educated at the Port Royal Abbey in Paris, where she mastered the arts of writing and of distinguishing herself with modesty in the salons.¹¹ Within this literary and learned family, Victorine and her younger brother, Henri Louis (1772–1834), would receive in Paris “an education far superior to that of the young ladies of [her] time.”¹² Almost immediately, “the superiority of [her] intelligence, [her] appetite for a wide variety of studies […] rare powers of observation, straight thinking” revealed themselves to her professors as Roserot (1849–1932) posthumously presented her.¹³ As early as five or six years of age, an instructor began teaching Chastenay the catechism, grammar, history, and geography. She also started learning music and drawing. Before nine years of age, she began to cite passages of books she had read in letters to her father, who would respond to her.¹⁴ A certain Monsieur Gilbert (?-?) became Victorine’s and Henri Louis’s professor of mathematics. Gilbert’s lessons included arithmetic, then “geometry, algebra, spherical geometry, all of elementary mathematics.”¹⁵

Around 1780, she learned Italian in secret with her brother so they could surprise their parents during a party for friends.¹⁶ The secret learning practices of these siblings were also witnessed by a wide variety of house guests, who delighted in these children’s “prodigies.”¹⁷ At ten, Victorine de Chastenay read Horace, wrote passionately about Racine’s play Britannicus, and started learning Latin a year later. The construction of her knowledges married regular lessons with a tutor, private knowledge practices, and the social obligations tied to her rank. As she testified later: “I read a lot, I made excerpts from books, book plans, translations, even poems. I had little free time; I spent it with my brother, I chatted with my parents, I went for a walk […] in the evenings I saw a few visitors […].”¹⁸ When she turned 14, she was granted the title of chanoinesse, an ecclesiastic title neither involving vows nor preventing marriage, but which allowed her to keep her belongings and gave her the honorific title Madame de Chastenay.¹⁹

De Chastenay’s parents provided equal education to their children, regardless of their gender, which was quite unusual for the time and context they lived in. They furnished the siblings with the best tutors, who provided common lessons for both children in all fields of study.²⁰ Victorine also spent a short period in the 1780s under the tutelage of Madame de Genlis (1746–1830), who was in charge of the education of the Duc d’Orléans family, including the future king, Louis Philippe (1773–1850). Chastenay judged Genlis’s taste as “rather mediocre” and the Orleans family’s educators as “second level […] masters in every field.”²¹ This criticism of the education provided by the “unofficial governess” of a prince de sang suggests the very high level to which Chastenay had been meticulously taught.²² These experiences helped her to master courtly manners, and familiarized her with the most politically powerful players of the coming decades. As she was growing and taking on more and more social responsibilities (such as visits or household activities), she devoted part of her nights to reading and writing. Chastenay encountered in books and scholarly journals these endeavours in literature, poetry, history, science, politics, philosophy, and foreign languages. She wrote: “I was reading instead of sleeping. Sometimes I would get up restless and write in a journal of facts and thoughts….”²³ Here Chastenay mobilizes rhetoric to fashion herself as a fully-fledged scholarly author whose commitment to knowledges was beyond questioning.

Chastenay’s habit of taking notes started when she was an infant and would last until she passed away. She wrote about her most striking thoughts concerning books and journals she had read or about important events of the day. The practice of note-taking, which was common among savants of the period, helped to construct and to transmit knowledges.²⁴ As Anne Blair has noted:

The transmission served by personal notes most often operates within one individual’s experience—from a moment of reading and note taking to a later moment when the notes are read and sometimes rearranged and used in articulating a thought. But personal notes can also be shared with others, on a limited scale with family and friends and on a wider scale through publication, notably in genres that compile useful reading notes for others.²⁵

In Chastenay’s case, both private and public examples were present. As a young woman, she reserved certain subjects (such as botany) to private practice, while others (such as history) enjoyed wider circulation as published works. Within this context, note-taking played an essential part in some savants’ practices, since it offered speedier access to information, aided in memorization, and participated in constructing the savants’ credibility by referencing the knowledges of other established savants. The importance of note-taking for Chastenay is readily noticed: she used them systematically and gave them a standardized structure which can be divided into two parts. First, the facts: the title of the work she read, the date when she wrote, and the key notions appeared after being systematically introduced by “I have just read….”²⁶ Second, she expressed her thoughts about the style, her interest in the topic, and the feelings the work elicited. All were written down by Chastenay as a part of her reading notes.²⁷ She regularly used these notes as a reminder of what she had learned and to determine her level of progress upon rereading a text. The way Victorine de Chastenay worked was shared by many eighteenth-century scholars, both male and female, in more or less structured and recurring forms. Émilie Du Châtelet’s or Jérôme Lalande’s archives also present notes for further studies, with corrections and comments.²⁸ This form of note-taking had become common since at least the sixteenth century, as illustrated by the following pages from Ortelius’s notebooks (Fig. 1).²⁹

Fig. 1

Reproduction of a collection of notes by Abraham Ortelius (1527–98), already published in (Blair 2004). (Courtesy of the Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerp –UNESCO, World Heritage, MS 285)

Let us now analyse more deeply and materially Chastenay’s practices of knowledge in the making.³⁰ Between 1811 and 1812, the chanoinesse received private courses in astronomy given by François Arago (1786–1853) from the Paris Observatory in her household. The first lesson, on 10 November 1811, followed her reading of de Bailly’s Histoire de l’astronomie.³¹ The astronomer’s teaching style was based on the pupil reading a particular work and asking questions of the savant about those items they had failed to understand. Similar methods were used by other savants. Thus the outlines of the lesson were sketched from a single point of departure: the simple presentation of a world system. After an interruption of several months, the ten lessons were finished on 4 July 1812, despite Chastenay’s request for just a couple more. Each lesson was painstakingly noted in one of her many notebooks or on note paper. It generally was written on four pages, and composed into forty folios covering the entirety of Chastenay’s lessons.³² She would take notes during the lesson, and later clean them up through recopying.

The structure of her courses’ manuscripts, as seen in Fig. 2, is often the same. In general, she noted on the first page the date, the number of the lesson and eventually its general title. Half of the page on the right was meant to receive her notes, while the other half was left blank, eventually to be used for corrections when necessary. In such a case, Chastenay would cross out the initial text on the right hand of the page and indicate by a cross the place where to insert the new paragraph on the left hand, as shown in Fig. 3. More study would be necessary to understand if this notebook consisted of notes taken during lessons or those she reworked and cleaned up afterwards, one or several times.³³ There are many cases of the blank half of the page having been used for corrections: added materials, references to another lesson, or improvement to the text, including multiple corrections with paragraphs being crossed out and re-written and then crossed out and rewritten again.

Fig. 2

Notes from Chastenay’s second astronomy lesson with Arago, 28 April 1812. The blue rectangle indicates the date, and the red rectangle, the number of the lesson. The green rectangle highlights the space left free for future corrections or additions. (Archives départementales de la Côte-d’Or, E SUP. 378/6. Reproduction Isabelle Lémonon-Waxin, 2016)

Fig. 3

Notes from Chastenay’s second astronomy lesson with Arago, 28 April 1812. The yellow rectangle indicates the crossed-out text. The orange ones mark the crosses showing where the new paragraph added on the left should go on the right hand of the page. (Archives départementales de la Côte-d’Or, E SUP. 378/6. Reproduction Isabelle Lémonon-Waxin, 2016)

Most of Chastenay’s notes were in the form of text. She believed in the efficiency and superiority of the “philosophical style”—using only phrases and not drawings or formulas—to explain something. As she wrote about geometry:

I have always believed that one could discuss geometry using philosophical logic and, thus, mathematical truths would all be eligible for presentation to the mind through a series of abstract propositions of rigorous accuracy […] I know that any image would grasp this truth at a glance, but for my purposes it is enough to show howsoever one’s intelligence might have grasped it.³⁴

Chastenay felt that textual expressions were a sign of deeper understanding. She sometimes used drawings to show the results of her botanical observations, but Chastenay never used them in astronomy, geometry, physics, or chemistry, even when she felt a drawing might have made the explanation easier. Thus, her approach to knowledges matches better the encyclopedic vision of earlier eighteenth-century philosophers rather than the more specialized approach of later nineteenth-century scientists. Her knowledge in the making in science derives from this vision as she testified herself:

When I was studying them, I did not have much taste for the exact sciences […] but since I understood that these determined bases [demonstrations and elementary arithmetic] were those of a scale without term; since the earth considered in this respect, was for me no more than an observatory from which one guesses the heavens; since the natural sciences have taught me that the universal author first amuses our pride in all things with very exact consequences, in order to then suddenly rob his works of what these consequences were of more subtlety, I have considered with admiration this chain of simple truths whose ideality makes them right and which govern all matter.³⁵

Chastenay used these philosophical approaches and styles, as well as a strong structuring of note-taking for many years and in many spaces. She developed this habit in the privacy of her household, and then she exported it later into institutional spaces.

Adapting the Household’s Privacy to Reconcile Writing and Social Obligations

The numerous ego documents left by Chastenay act as direct witnesses to the historical period that they traverse, but they also speak to her state of mind, her emotions, and her motivations.³⁶ This rich documentary resource, most often written up in the privacy of her bedroom, conveys the importance of research at home for this perpetual student. Chastenay wrote of her youth that she “passionately loved studying.”³⁷ She even wondered where this passion came from: “A passionate fondness for studying must support a similar [fondness] for liberty.”³⁸ At the time of the Revolution, Chastenay rebelled against a social order that neglected women’s education:

As a member of the aristocracy, I already had to suffer ancient dowagers, and the burdens inflicted on me by mediocrity, which called itself common sense, hating knowledge for the overall nation and talent in young women […] The idea of being nothing when merit meant everything would never let me close my eyes: I would rather read than sleep […] so that I not be misunderstood, I was passionate for glory, I only wanted glory.³⁹

This overheated statement represents an image seldom seen of a young noblewoman, quite distant from the timid, discrete girl who was first presented to society during the Ancien Régime. Merit and glory, the prerogatives of men, suddenly seemed accessible to Chastenay at the beginning of the Revolution, thanks to the unconventional level of education she had received and the pledge of independence incorporated into her ecclesiastic title. It was under the protection of private life that Chastenay felt she could indulge in such confessions, which would not be published until well after her death.⁴⁰ These words, even coming from a noblewoman, could not be accepted by the gender norms of her time, which made women the guardians of family values subject to masculine authority.⁴¹

After the final upheavals of the Revolution had sent the Chastenay family to prison and temporarily separated the chanoinesse from her studies, she immersed herself once again in the delights of scientific learning. She also published her first translations of English novels, and became a close friend of Empress Josephine (1763–1814), Napoléon’s first wife. Chastenay’s nobility, ecclesiastic title, and education placed her within a very broad political and scientific network at the beginning of the nineteenth century. She benefited from a great level of respectability, had been raised to ‘shine’ at court, and knew exactly how to behave. Using her network of relationships rather than money, Chastenay became a sponsor for many scholars and friends. Her status protected her from the harsh criticisms often levelled against femmes savantes she faced as a teenager.⁴² Thus Chastenay was able to study as much as she wanted as long as she respected social and gendered rules. One of these social gender rules was the understanding that only certain revelations from private life could be made public. For this reason, domestic spaces became key concerns in the construction of knowledges.⁴³ As the place where knowledges were produced, the home has become, since the 1990s, a vested interest of historians of the sciences.⁴⁴ For Alix Cooper, the home should be considered as a scientific institution, a concept to which one need not subscribe in order to grasp the importance of domestic spaces to historians of the sciences.⁴⁵ As envisioned by Deborah Harkness, the home becomes a transition space between, on the one hand, the monasteries and universities of medieval times and, on the other hand, the laboratories and academies of modern science. Within this concept, the household became, since at least the sixteenth century, a space considered deeply feminine.⁴⁶ Exploring this space enables an archaeology of scientific practices of knowledge in the making: located in, for example, the kitchen, the nursery, and the garden. These practices were organized and carried out by the women and men of the household, which had become an increasingly private and intimate concept by the end of the seventeenth century.⁴⁷ The evolution of the concept of privacy between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries led to a reconfiguration of spaces and social relations.⁴⁸ In effect, as François Simonet-Tenant notes:

the proven need for a room of one’s own, where one can protect their individual privacy, their need to fully belong, their proof of membership, and their need to construct in the material world the density of relationships maintained by a sense of self…⁴⁹

constrained physical spaces in seventeenth-century bourgeois and noble households. At that time, the bedroom, previously considered a space both for sleeping and for socializing, slowly lost its social functions to become a space for inward-looking withdrawal. This “room of one’s own”, which could also become the space where a scholar or researcher would produce knowledges, was transformed by the practices performed inside of it.⁵⁰ Thus, an exploration of the home establishes interactions within and between spaces, including their overlaps and transformations. For example, a space could be used intimately among the family in the morning and become a scene for public receptions in the afternoon. The household where private and public scientific practices succeeded one another was ruled by numerous social customs, many of them gender-specific. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, these gender norms were often imposed on domestic spaces that could ensure the decency of women. Customs fixed the hours when knowledge-making practices would be appropriate; who could participate in such practices (in line with their level of recognition); the types of acceptable practices, and so forth.

Chastenay left an important testimony of this kind of regulation. Her valuable account helps to locate a great part of her learning practices in her room, a private space where she engaged alone in the individual construction of her knowledges from her childhood to her old age. She emphasized that she was “accustomed […] to finding my[her]self a main object [of thinking] in the room.”⁵¹ When she was an infant and a teenager, the chanoinesse would sometimes share a bedroom with her brother so that they could study together as much as possible. She “saw few people, but so many masters and of so many species that they were already a society. […she] had dinner and supper in a room with [her] brother, in order to save time.”⁵² From 1790 to 1800, she described the spatio-temporal organization of her days in her family’s private mansion, probably located at 18 rue Royale in Paris:

Mom’s old bedroom became a small drawing room, which, under the circumstances was quite adequate: I would dress there in the morning, study there part of the day, at my desk hidden behind a folding screen: as soon as Mom started receiving visitors [in the afternoon] I would move into her private bedroom my books and manuscripts.⁵³

Implicit rules clearly constrained the ways in which Chastenay could practice knowledge-making. It had to remain hidden from all but her most intimate relations (her immediate family and their servants). Was this a gendered prohibition? We need not think it was more than a custom that probably derived from the sociability norms associated with the daily visitors received by Chastenay’s mother, which limited the spatio-temporal organization of knowledge production and circulation. A legacy of eighteenth-century sociability influenced the organization of space through rococo architectural styling. Based on beauty, comfort, intimacy, and elegance, it favoured exchanges between beautiful minds (beaux-esprits) through the development of new room types: living rooms, studies, drawing rooms, etc.⁵⁴ The pomp of courtly life gave way to the intimacy of smaller rooms in private mansions. These rooms were furnished with a number of aesthetically necessary objects.

The folding screen, of Chinese inspiration, was a frequent part of room furnishings, not least because it could be used to make adjustments to the room as required by intimacy and decorum. In the Chastenay mansion, a folding screen announced the multi-functional aspects of the small drawing room where the chanoinesse and her mother dressed, read, and received friends. Because of the folding screen, Victorine could maintain some privacy from servants and her parents (while dressing or writing, for example), or hide the mess of her books from close friends. This screen represented order that conformed to social conventions and gender norms which imposed humility and discretion on women. Chastenay was taught to respect the customs of nobility. Thus, she mobilized concealment as a social strategy that enabled her to pursue her studies. Behind the privacy afforded by a folding screen in the small drawing room, Chastenay would write in her journal that she wished for glory, freely expressing her emotions and motivations. Once in society, on the other side of that screen, she would shoulder a more public role, following conventional guidelines that she also used to her advantage.

Privacy in Institutional Spaces

Parisian institutions such as the Royal College (after the Revolution, the Collège de France), Botanical Gardens, or the Observatory were rarely publicly open to women who acted on the construction of scientific knowledges during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In private, women were permitted access based on a male savant’s introduction; and they could circulate more or less freely based on their level of recognition. Women’s knowledge-making practices could be the same as men’s as long as they remained informal. Women were publicly and more easily welcomed into institutions as auditors, through public courses, or during important social events such as the public Assembly of the Royal College, for example.⁵⁵

In Chastenay’s case, the doors of these institutions were also informally opened to her private practices in natural history alongside some of the most influential savants of her time. She took private chemistry lessons with Chevreul (1786–1889) in his lab and in the Jardin des plantes (Muséum) in Paris in 1814.⁵⁶ Thanks to René Desfontaines (1750–1833), director of the Muséum, whom Chastenay had known since infancy, the doors of the botany laboratory at the Muséum were opened wide. There she devoted her time to numerous observational studies in close proximity to her fellow savants. Around 1811 or 1812 she presented her botanical observations to her instructor, providing a precise account:

I went to see M. Desfontaines to have him read my descriptions of the cherry or the apricot; I communicated my comments on M. de Jussieu’s system of classification, and on its mixture of an artificial system [of classification] with the natural method; which most people bother with now only to pretend that they have found it […] My remarks amused M. Desfontaines more than once, and he was helpful in having me communicate them to M. de Candolle, his favourite student; and I can remember with much fondness those mornings of instruction with two very distinguished gentlemen who greatly honoured me with their attentions, enlightening me with their intellect; and almost availing themselves of my advice. It was often in the laboratories of the Botanical Gardens that I would find M. Desfontaines. […] I would meet M. Mirbel there, and he would teach me to find tracheae [xylem] of new growth and in leaves.⁵⁷

Under the tutelage of some of the most renowned botanists of her time, many of whom she could count among her closest friends, Chastenay was encouraged to continue her serious and hard-working studies in natural history. On May 1813, during a visit to the botanical laboratories when Desfontaines, Deleuze (1753–1835), and Mirbel were present, she questioned them on a number of complicated issues in botany, i.e. the acclimatization of trees and double flowers. On this occasion, she also observed for the first time the parenchyma (soft tissue) of a plant:

The parenchyma is a marrow. M. Desfontaines, strangely enough, is the one who taught M. D’Aubenton to distinguish it, when his [D’Aubenton] attempt was unsuccessful. I, for my part, had a lot of fun seeing them. When I recognized them for the first time, I was like M. Jourdain speaking in prose.⁵⁸

The botanical laboratories of the Muséum, the pinnacle of institutional naturalist learning, were thus also a workbench for the apprenticeship of Chastenay. There she learned to implement experimental practices in botany, within a socially-limited setting initiated through her personal and privileged relationship with Desfontaines. Of course, her social position and her long friendship with Desfontaines facilitated Chastenay’s integration into a clearly masculine institution, where women were excluded from all official functions.⁵⁹ However, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, her presence reveals the unofficial circulation of some women within the Muséum’s laboratories. Chastenay’s scientific practices were spatially dynamic and can be divided into three main parts. First, she would carry out preliminary investigations on a particular subject, reading books and journals and writing reports on her readings in a quiet and withdrawn space at home. Then she would implement a more learned study, an apprenticeship with a savant, which was sometimes organized at her home, but quite often took place at the savant’s home or institution. Next, she would correct her notes at home, which would lead to further questions discussed with the savant.

Several examples of such practices remain in Chastenay’s archives. Her notes on collaborations in the Muséum or in the Paris Observatory with institutional savants consist of narration about her visits combined with observations she made during them.⁶⁰ The structure of these manuscripts (in the sense of handwritten pages, as seen in Fig. 4) is quite different from the one exposed in Figs. 2 and 3. Only the date when she wrote appears as a title, and the text fills the entire page, without any additions or crossings-out. She indicated the visit had occurred a short time before (less than one or two days). This suggests a cleaned-up version of notes she might have taken during her observations, presented later in the form of a diary of facts and thoughts. The pressure on the quill also gives the text a temporal rhythm.⁶¹ This comparison provides temporal evidence about her note-taking practices. This documentary and temporal evidence can be explained by the nature of the documents: between ones that are reports of visits probably written afterwards and notes taken during a lesson at home. Chastenay’s knowledge in the making seems very structured with different categories of class notes (lessons’ drafts, cleaned-up lessons, and one-off lessons as diaries). Within these categories, it also appears materially and temporally organized. Further investigations would be needed to fully understand her material practices of knowledge in the making.

Fig. 4

Notes from Chastenay’s visit to Desfontaine’s botanical lab at the Muséum, March 7th 1813. The blue rectangle indicates the date. (Archives départementales de la Côte-d’Or, E SUP. 378/6. Reproduction Isabelle Lémonon-Waxin, 2016)

The structure of the chanoinesse’s handwritten pages is further visible in her notes from 1812–13 about Cuvier’s public courses on natural history at the Collège de France. As she testified in her Memoirs, Chastenay would go to the Collège in the afternoon, where she would take initial notes that display signs of her note-taking strategies and methodology. She would return home at 5:00 PM, and after the evening’s social visits, she would write a clean version of her lesson notes during the night from 1:00 AM onwards.⁶² Thus, the intimacy of her bedroom allowed her to prepare her text and to be ready for the following public lessons. A clean version of these notes is still available in the archives.⁶³ It takes the form displayed in Fig. 4 (a full handwritten page without having divided, added, or crossed anything out). But at the top of the lesson, the date, the number of the lesson and the name of the professor are marked. Her note-taking activity was completed by analyses in the form of appendixes, as presented, for example, in Fig. 5 about Cuvier’s classes. Here, Chastenay wrote for herself an index of the scholars quoted during the course, and the objects, century, and location of their studies. The objects are classified both by date and by disciplines, such as chemistry, medicine, botany, and mining.

Fig. 5

Index from Chastenay’s notes about Cuvier’s public lessons on natural history at the Collège de France, written on March 26, 1813. This index is entitled Appendices des leçons de M. Cuvier. The light blue rectangle indicates the column of the period (here sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), and the purple rectangles the columns of names, objects, and places. From the sixteenth century onwards, the names of scientific disciplines (anatomy, chemistry, etc.) appear inside the column of the period (pink rectangles). (Archives départementales de la Côte-d’Or, E SUP. 378/25. Reproduction Isabelle Lémonon-Waxin, 2016)

Chastenay left traces in her Mémoires about some of the difficulties she encountered in attending public lectures. To take part in Cuvier’s course on natural history at the Collège de France, she first contacted her long-time friend and nobleman, the botanist Louis Aubert du Petit-Thouars (1758–1831) to act as a go-between. As a woman, social norms would condemn her for remaining alone with a large group of men. Cuvier, well aware of this issue, let her know that “as to propriety, […] Mme Cuvier and her daughter would also be attending the lectures,” so the obstacle would be overcome.⁶⁴ Then, du Petit-Thouars escorted her to and from her home to the lectures for her reputation and safety, thus, she would not travel alone across Paris. Chastenay also mentioned the obstacles faced by a woman in her forties in 1811 making astronomical observations at the Paris Observatory at night:

Unfortunately, you can only go in the evening or at night to visit these stars, which I always adore. I could not go alone to the Temple of Urania [the Paris Observatory], I could not even go on foot with a guide: the area is too isolated. Mother even forbade me to go there by carriage; she thought she was pleasing me several times by taking me there in her carriage, but this very complacency on her part could not be pleasing to me: I could not be sure of either the time or the day. Moreover, the talks I came to seek could not, in the presence of my mother, have the character and the kind of scope that, without saying that I was very learned [savante], they would undoubtedly have had for me, if I had spoken alone.⁶⁵

Chastenay’s critique of gender norms imposed on women for centuries regarding their appearance in a public space is obvious in her words. Going out alone, talking with a man in a public space at night were considered unchaste, which could ruin the good female reputation (then some references to France and female honour). These implicit gendered rules, which regulated both public and private spaces, were a major obstacle to women’s investment in astronomical observational practices.

The chanoinesse’s example demonstrates that, once again, the location of knowledge production through a gender analysis cannot be simply reduced to the opposition of private-feminine/public-masculine space.⁶⁶ As Pauline Schmitt-Pantell states: “The use of the concepts of ‘domestic’ and ‘public’ in the study of sex roles calls for the same criticism as that made of the use of the concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. This opposition seems to be a new variant of the ‘reduction of sex categories to their biological definition’”.⁶⁷

Conclusion

The case of Victorine de Chastenay clearly shows the extent to which “a room of one’s own” was necessary to the practicing savante, who required some privacy equally applicable to women and men during their study period. Whatever its configuration, this space necessarily constrained the knowledges produced or acquired inside of it. Conversely, the need to evolve knowledge-making practices could also engender modifications to the original uses for which the space was designed. In this sense, cases involving female savantes were not inherently different from their male counterparts. On the other hand, the way these spaces were used was often gender-specific, since those uses were associated with rules of discretion and secrecy rarely applied in men’s cases. Even when some women circulated within institutions of learning (such as the Muséum’s botany laboratories in the case of Chastenay) in order to participate in the production of knowledges, their presence often remained unofficial: a social visit rather than a scientific one. Nonetheless, the knowledges circulated easily from some women’s private spaces of withdrawal into the publications of learned institutions, thanks to the relationships developed by the savants alongside of whom these women studied.

This familiarity with savants, unusual level of education for a young woman in the early nineteenth century, and high social status, all contributed to the establishment of a favourable environment for the production of Chastenay’s knowledges. Respecting the social norms established by her nobility and her gender, Chastenay organized her time and private space to be able to study. She dynamically established a form of knowledge production in between the intimacy of her bedroom, where she prepared her preliminary studies; in the privacy of her home or a lab, where she received private lessons from one or a couple of tutors; and in public exchanges in scholarly institutions and salons. These dynamics were going back and forth between these experiences and locations associated with practical tools such as notebooks and reading notes. This way, Chastenay set up a very structured method to develop her knowledges through note-taking since her childhood, as had some other eighteenth-century learned and privileged women and men. The study initiated in 2020 of her manuscripts, considered for the most part as ego documents, will undoubtedly make it possible in the future to understand better the articulation of her various tools, thanks in particular to digital humanities. The identification of these tools and their uses in relation to various types of knowledges, places, and actors will certainly provide a more detailed understanding of Chastenay’s knowledge in the making.

Here, it is through a woman’s private practices that knowledge in the making reveals itself, despite the exclusion of her gender from scholarly institutions. However, this exclusion resulted in many learned and privileged women relying on self-censorship and forced reclusion in knowledge production. Privacy was a form of protection of status and credibility for eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French women who were often considered ridiculous or monstrous in the exercise of knowledge. Thanks to this protection, Victorine de Chastenay left us a precious testimony of the feelings that knowledge in the making awakened in her and that she could hide in the secrecy of her manuscripts written behind a folding screen.