| Family Name: | Mademoiselle de la Chaux | ||||
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| Birth Date: | 1719 | ||||
| Death Date: | 1757 | ||||
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Translations
| Original Title | Translation title | Author |
|---|---|---|
| Political Discourses |
Essais sur le commerce, le luxe, l'argent, l'intérêt de l'argent, les impots; le crédit publique, et la balance du commerce
|
David Hume |
translations activities
Diderot tells us that in order to help her husband Monsieur Gareil with translations, de la Chaux learned Greek, Hebrew, Italian and English. From Diderot's correspondence, she is also believed to have produced a French translation of Xenophon's Symposyum in the 1750s, but there is no trace of such a book. Similarly, she translated bits and pieces of Thucydides.
Diderot also attributes to de la Chaux a translation of David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, supposedly published in Amsterdam around 1751, but the only French versions from the 1750s published there are known to be by other translators.
Whether Mademoiselle de la Chaux was the pseudonym for a lady philosophe or a fictional character Diderot created as a literary jeu d'esprit, her name has been associated with a partial translation of David Hume's Political Discourses.
secondary bibliography references
P. Le Bas, France. dictionnaire encyclopédique, Paris, Firmin Didot, vol. 9, pp. 1843, pp. 826-827.
L. L. Bongie, Diderot's Femme Savante, Oxford, Voltaire Foundation, 1977.
Id., 'Retour à Mademoiselle de la Chaux, ou Faut-il encore marcher sur des œufs?', Recherches sur Diderot et sur l'Encyclopédie, 6, n°1 (1989), pp. 62-104.
L. Pirroux, 'Who Killed Mlle de la Chaux? Enlightenment Authorship and the Dangers of Historical Realism', MLN, 127, n°4 (September 2012), pp. 783-805.
Translations
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Political Discourses
- Translation Title: Essais sur le commerce, le luxe, l'argent, l'intérêt de l'argent, les impots; le crédit publique, et la balance du commerce
- Original Author: David Hume
- Original title: Political Discourses
- Publ. Year From: 1751 to:
- lang: English
- Translation: Essais sur le commerce, le luxe, l'argent, l'intérêt de l'argent, les impots; le crédit publique, et la balance du commerce
- Pub. Place: Paris and Lyon
- Pub. Date: 1766
- Lang: French
- Note:
De la Chaux translated seven of Hume's original essays, giving to her edition a clear economic content. She also added the translation of a letter on taxes and manufactures published in London in 1765 (second edition), which is impossible to identify.
Some evidence suggest that these translations had been incorporated in the volumes of the Œuvres philosophiques de M. D. Hume (published in London in 1764 and afterwards in Paris in 1788). Of the collection, the volumes one to four and the sixth have been translated by Jean-Bernard Mérian, the fifth by Jean-Baptiste-René Robinet and the seventh by de la Chaux.
By:
- Giovanni Lista