Guillaume Le Gentil

🥲 The chronology of suffering
Year
What happened
1725
Le Gentil is born 🇫🇷
1760
It leaves France for India 🚢
1761
War → cannot reach Pondicherry
June 6, 1761
Watch the transit from a boat, but the measurements are useless 🌊
1761–1769
He decides to stay in the Indian Ocean for 8 years
1769
It is being prepared in Pondicherry
June 3, 1769
☁️ Clouds → misses the second transit
1770
The return begins
1771
He returns to France after ~11 years
1771
He discovers that they had presumed him dead 💀
1779–1781
She publishes her enormous travelogue 📚
1792
He died in Paris.

More or less, but caution is advised: there doesn't appear to be a reliable contemporary portrait of Guillaume Le Gentil. The Wikimedia Commons category specifically dedicated to him only includes material related to his works, not a confirmed portrait of him.

So, to imagine him, I would describe him as an 18th-century French astronomer, not as a documented appearance:

👨 Adult male, probably of a fairly formal appearance.

💇‍♂️ Long hair or tied up, according to French men's fashion in the mid-18th century.

🎩 She could wear a powdered wig or have her hair styled in the fashion of the period.

🧥 Elegant clothing of a French aristocrat/intellectual: long coat, vest, white shirt and collar with tie or scarf.

🧑‍🔬 For a portrayal as an astronomer: dark and sober clothing, with astronomical instruments nearby.

🧔 We cannot say for sure whether he had a beard, mustache, eye color, height, etc.; these characteristics are not well documented.

Furthermore, he was born in 1725, so during his expedition of 1760–1771 he was approximately 35 to 46 years old.

If you want to create an image of him, it would be better to represent him as a French astronomer of about 40 years old in 1765, instead of inventing that we know exactly what he looked like.

Guillaume Le Gentil was a French astronomer born in 1725. He became famous for attempting to observe the transit of Venus.

🚢 He traveled to India to observe it in 1761, but the war prevented him from arriving in time.

🌊 He observed it from a boat, but the movement made his measurements useless.

⏳ He decided to stay for 8 years waiting for the next transit.

☁️ In 1769, when it was finally perfectly prepared in Pondicherry, the clouds covered the Sun right during the phenomenon.

🇫🇷 He returned to France in 1771, after being away for about 11 years.

💀 There he discovered that they had believed he was dead and had rearranged his affairs.

🔭 Despite everything, he made many other scientific observations during his travels and continued to be an astronomer.

In short: he traveled for years to observe Venus and had TERRIBLE luck 😭, but his expedition was not useless and he left important scientific work.

YES, the family drama was almost as awful as the traffic incident 😭. There's a bit of confusion in some sources, so I'll separate them:

💔 His first wife

Before leaving on his expedition, Le Gentil was married to Marie Anne de Saint-Jean de Dizy. He left France in 1760 and spent about 11 and a half years away.

The problem was that his letters never reached France due to the dangers and difficulties of sea travel. So, after so many years without news, the authorities eventually declared him legally dead.

And then:

His wife, believing he had died, remarried.

His family members began to divide his assets, because legally he was dead.

His position in the Academy of Sciences was also declared vacant and filled by someone else.

And then imagine Le Gentil arriving in France in 1771:

Le Gentil: “I’m alive!”
Family: “WHAT??? 💀”
Wife: "...I'm already married again." 😭

⚖️ And what did he do?

He had to resort to legal proceedings to try to recover his properties and his academic position. He didn't manage to recover everything related to his assets, but he finally regained his position at the Academy, with the king's intervention.

👶 Did she have children?

Here's the important part: no offspring are mentioned with his first wife in the sources I found.

But after returning, he remarried in 1774, to Marie-Michelle Potier, a woman from a family he had known for some time. They had a daughter named Marie-Adélaïde.

So, despite ALL the disaster, in the end she managed to rebuild her family life. 🥹

Summary of the historical gossip: He left → disappeared for 11 years → no one received his letters → he was declared dead → his wife remarried → his belongings were divided → he returned alive → he had to fight legally for his estate → he remarried → he had a daughter → he lived his last years peacefully as an astronomer. 😭🔭