| Chapter 1: | A Brief Introductory Survey of Dupin’s Life |
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Chamber of Deputies and with an exhibition, probably the British Great Exhibition of 1851, for which Dupin was the president of the French committee (see chapter 14.5). The letter is one of sympathy for the loss of Mme. de Prony’s sister-in-law:
The ‘dreadful scourge’ was probably cholera, of which there was a major outbreak in France in 1832 and a second in 1849. Dupin was a close friend of the great engineer Gaspard de Prony, to whom there will be many references in subsequent chapters.
In his little Nivernais5 region, Dupin involved himself in local duties, doubling his national ones; he was the mayor of Saizy, a commune in the Nièvre, and conseiller général6 for the Nièvre town of Tannay. Faithful to his native town of Varzy, he gifted to it the family library of more than two thousand volumes.
Shortly before his death, Dupin wrote to Louis Pasteur, who was thirty-eight years his junior, ‘Allow me to send you my warmest congratulations for your admirable research on alcohol fermentation … the way looks clear to create from this work a new era in science to which you owe your well-earned reputation’ (ASHM CC7 779; PJ 4). This letter is dated 28 August 1872.
A few months later, the Academy of Sciences received a letter dated 18 January 1873, signed by the Count du Hamel de Breuil, Dupin’s son-in-law, announcing Dupin’s death: ‘My father-in-law died this morning …, the result of the rupture of a probe in his bladder … [he] died fully conscious, patient, resigned, comforted by his faith and confident in God’s mercy’ (AAS; PJ 5).
Dupin was buried in Clamecy, a small town in the Nièvre, and speeches were made at his graveside—one by General Arthur J. Morin (1795–1880), representing the Conservatoire des arts et métiers, and