Profession: translator

Gottsched’s claim to fame (her status is still much contested) is two-fold: as an author and translator in her own right, and as the uncredited contributor of much that was published under the name of her husband, Johann Christoph Gottsched; her own career seems to have been very much subjugated to his, despite her renown as one of the great intelligences of her time. She studied the lute under the composer Weiss (who is known to have visited her at least once), and wrote the entry on him in a reference work of her husband’s. Grimm, who had studied under her husband, was a correspondent.

Dumont met Bentham while living in London, became his disciple, and for two decades edited his works (making them more readable) and translated them into French, ensuring their much wider reception and influence. Between them, Dumont and Mill were indispensible allies to Bentham. De la Rive and de Candolle were well-known members of the Geneva scientific establishment; Edgeworth, a friend of Dumont’s, recounted dining with all three while visiting the city. She described him as very fat and with monstrous eyebrows, felt sure love had passed him by, and said he loved Bentham and Mont Blanc above all.

His lifelong schoolfriend Gautier wrote a soul-searching memoir after Nerval’s suicide. They were members of Nodier’s Cénacle, where Hugo and Dumas were ‘stars’, and subsequently of Gautier’s own more bohemian Club des Haschischins, alongside Baudelaire and Delacroix. Nerval happily cultivated his own reputation (so accounts of him leading a lobster named Thibault for walks may have been embellished). He translated his friend Heine’s work, travelled the Rhine and wrote an operetta with Dumas, and was written to by Goethe praising the translations he’d done, aged 19, of his ‘Faust’ (illustrated by Delacroix).