Jacquemont, Victor, 1801-1832

Born in Paris on August 8, 1801, the youngest of four sons of Venceslas and Rose Laisné Jacquemont, Victor Jacquemont became one of the rising stars of French natural history and an archetype for the scientist in the Romantic era. Combining youth, genius, and a rhapsodic love of nature with a life filled with masculine affection, star-crossed romance, and exotic climes, Jacquemont epitomized the romantic intellectual right up to the time of his untimely death in the Himalayas. In a career in which ill fortune and good fortune walked hand in hand, the figure of Jacquemont has all but overshadowed his substantial scientific accomplishments.

As a youth, Jacquemont pursued a course of classical studies at the Lycée Imperiale before entering into a scientific course at the Collège de France in 1817 to study chemistry under Louis Jacques Thenard (1777-1857). When a laboratory accident waylaid him, however, Jacquemont's interests drifted to botany. At the Château La Grange, home of the Marquis de Lafayette, Jacquemont had recovered sufficiently by 1820 to undertake a botanical tour of northeastern France, further whetting his enthusiasm for his new passion. His coterie of friends, including Adolphe Brogniart, Hippolyte Jaubert, Albert Kunth, and Adrien de Jussieu, helped sharpen Jacquemont's skills in botany, geology, and mineralogy, and together, they founded the Société d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris to promote their sciences. Jacquemont's social and intellectual ambit grew steadily, and by his twenty-first birthday, he had been received into the influential salon of étienne Delécluze in Paris, and later, into the circle gathered about Mme Pasta. He eventually counted among his valued associates such stellar figures as Stendahl and Prosper Mérimée.

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