Chevalier De Research Articles

Travel – Milorad Rajčević’s Life Option

Milorad Rajcevic/Raitchevitch (Mala Drenova, 1890 – Lubbecke, 1964), the first Serb “world traveler”, travelled for twenty years, tak­ing four big journeys – to the Far East, from Europe and Siberia to Palestine and back to Belgrade. His second journey (1913 – 1914) took him to the Americas, travelling from Alaska to Cape Horn. On his third journey (1923 – 1924) he travelled extensively throughout Africa. During his fourth big voyage (1933-1934), he found himself in India again, and then Australia, New Zealand, he made a stopover in Fiji and Hawaii, and also America. His travel articles were pub­lished in Mali Žurnal (The Little Journal) and Balkan (The Balkans) newspapers, and his travelogues were published in Serbian, French, and Spanish. He made a bet that he would visit Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas over a two-year journey on which he set out on March 15, 1910, and that he would cover 120,000 km. This, at the time, was indeed a rare feat on a global scale, and not just in Ser­bia. He was only twenty years old when he decided to embark on a trip around the world. (Before, as a young man, Rajcevic went on a journey for four years, becoming fascinated by travel, and learning several languages.) He always travelled alone and proudly wore the national tricolor on his left arm, making every effort to “walk with his head high, as a newspaper correspondent and a gentleman”. He was proud that he could “carry for the first time the national tricolor through foreign countries”. His dignified demeanor left the impression that his was a “nation of high culture and nobility”. He spoke several languages fluently – German, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Greek, Italian and half a dozen other languages. Rajcevic published several books, his first book Biografia e impresiones de los viajes del mundo a traves del famoso Milorad de Raitchevitch Explorador Mundial Publicista Serbio was published in Spanish in 1918 and his last book Biographien und Autogrammem Staatsanner und anderer Personlichkeiten des 20. Jahrhunderts was published in 1960 in German. He was decorated for his virtues by His Holiness the Patriarch of Jerusalem with the Cross of the Holy Sepulcher, which gave him the right to the title “Chevalier de St. Grave”. Rajcevic, like other authors of travelogues, pointed to the cultural differences he encountered. But, although he was a benevolent in­termediary between the two cultures, he was also prone to accepting certain stereotypes. For Rajcevic, the journey itself was more import­ant than writing. Travel gave purpose to his life, the opportunity to see new countries, but at the same time to represent his own. For him, travel writing was both a way to immortalise his own existence and to contribute to readers’ knowledge of other cultures. He tried to be the best mediator possible, mediating between his country and culture and other, mostly little-known, countries and cultures of the world.

What Is a Ruin? The Western Definition

What Is a Ruin? The Western Definition

Les boissons dans "Les Entretiens des cafés de Paris" du chevalier de Mailly

Si le XVIIe siècle a vu naître et se développer la mode des salons, le XVIIIe serait le temps des cafés. En 1702, le chevalier de Mailly publie un tableau haut en couleur de ce phénomène récent mais déjà établi où l’on découvre une vaste galerie de personnages, attablés à divers cafés de Paris. Dans cet article, nous dresserons tout d’abord un catalogue des différentes boissons mentionnées dans les Entretiens pour, ensuite, observer qu’elles s’avèrent révélatrices du goût de l’époque, ainsi que du statut ou de la personnalité des clients. D’autre part, nous verrons que ces consommations, selon qu’elles soient bues modérément ou pas, acquièrent un rôle tantôt socialisateur tantôt destructeur.

Interculturalité: la Louisiane au carrefour des cultures ed. by Nathalie Dessens and Jean-Pierre Le GLaunec

Reviewed by: Interculturalité: la Louisiane au carrefour des cultures ed. by Nathalie Dessens and Jean-Pierre Le GLaunec Erica Johnson Dessens, Nathalie and Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec, eds. — Interculturalité: la Louisiane au carrefour des cultures. Quebec: Presses de l'Université Laval, 2016. Pp. 370. Edited by Nathalie Dessens and Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec, this interdisciplinary volume grew out of two 2012 conferences on Louisiana's cultural history. This is not the first volume on Louisiana to utilize the notion of carrefour (crossroads) as a framework. In 2014, Cécile Vidal edited a collection, titled Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World, which approached Louisiana as a crossroads of three empires. In fact, Le Glaunec as well as three other contributors to this volume also authored chapters for Vidal's collection. However, Dessens and Le Glaunec seek to use the term differently. In their introduction, the editors explain that their reasons for using the term crossroads are twofold. First, they use it heuristically. In this way, they explain that Louisiana should not be prejudged, as "it can be a little 'creole' and very Atlantic (or the inverse) or neither one nor the other … a geographic and cultural reality, where the flux can be visible or not … and the flux continually varies with time and space" (p. 2). Second, they use it to engage historiographically. The editors identify three significant trends within Louisiana's historiography in recent years. The first of these historiographical moments was the focus on race in Louisiana's colonial history that began in the 1990s. The next moment was the development of Atlantic history in the 2000s. The last moment, currently underway, emphasizes diverse voices within a renewed narrative that explores "new concepts and new objects, in particular within an interdisciplinary perspective" (p. 6). Therefore, the editors brought together contributions from three scholarly perspectives: history, American studies, and linguistics. The thirteen body chapters offer perspectives of Louisiana as a crossroads through studies of material culture, identity politics, commemorations, religion, language, and music. While the table of contents is not divided into sections, the editors suggest loose groupings of the chapters in their introduction. Indeed, the broad temporal scope—almost three hundred years—of the volume makes distinct groupings difficult. Chronologically organized, there are two discernible divisions in the first half of the volume. The first three chapters focus on the colonial period, and chapters four through eight cover the nineteenth century. However, the remaining chapters do not cleanly fit within either of these parts. Chapters nine, ten, and eleven are linguistic studies. The final two chapters examine Louisiana in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Sylvia Frey, Sophie White, and Alexandre Dubé authored the three chapters on the eighteenth century. Focusing on the stories of the chevalier de Pradel and free man of color La Nuit, Frey portrays New Orleans as an Atlantic site for the mixing of European, Caribbean, and African cultures. She explores the continual transformation of culture, particularly through cuisine. White examines the racialization of material culture in the Ursuline convent in New Orleans. Through the story of Métis sister Marie Turpin, she reveals how the particularities of religious clothing reflected a racial hierarchy within the convent. Dubé also examines the importance of material culture in Louisiana's history. He focuses on [End Page 167] the role of a particular fabric, limbourg, in maintaining commercial and political alliances between the French and Indians along the Mississippi River. Marieke Polfliet, Nathalie Dessens, Rien T. Fertel, Genviève Piché, and Olivier Cabanac contributed chapters on the nineteenth century. Polfliet, Dessens, and Cabanac each provide analyses of the hybridization of political and cultural identity in Louisiana. Polfliet examines New Orleans as a crossroads of populations and political culture among exiles from France, immigrants from Canada, and refugees from Saint-Domingue from 1803 to 1815, with a particular interest in the influence of their French origins. She emphasizes the uniqueness in Louisiana's transition from a monarchy to the republic, under the United States, without a revolution. Dessens highlights a hybridized identity through examining celebrations, such as George Washington's birthday, the anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans, and Carnival. She explains, "The French saw...

MARIANA ALCOFORADO, A FREIRA PORTUGUESA: (RE)FIGURAÇÕES DA PERSONAGEM E TRANSFICCIONALIDADE

Em 1669 surgia em Paris Lettres Portugaises, coletânea de cartas de amor de Mariana Alcoforado ao Chevalier de Chamilly. Parte do fascínio e do sucesso editorial resultou do mistério que envolvia a sua autoria e da capacidade de inscrever o desejo no tecido textual, fazendo avultar contradições, obsessões e dilemas da experiência amorosa. Desde então, vem despertando profundo interesse, suscitando leituras na fronteira entre realidade e ficção, pelo que o nosso propósito consiste em rastrear no discurso televisivo, cinematográfico e teatral derivas e (re)figurações desse protótipo feminino. Numa certa fase, ganhou relevo o lastro ideológico da transgressão das convenções morais e das normas sociais, pela assunção da sexualidade e pela contestação do regime de clausura. É essa dimensão de resistência que Maricla Boggio aproveitará em La monaca portoghese (1980). Em termos de transposição audiovisual, é de considerar Mariana Alcoforado (1979), de Eduardo Geada, pela relevância dos procedimentos de figuração da personagem e por participar de uma série de produtos televisivos baseados em obras literárias. Em La religieuse portugaise (2009), Eugène Green propõe um diálogo insinuante com a tradição cultural ao apresentar Julie de Hauranne, que vem até Lisboa para participar na rodagem de um filme sobre Mariana, mas que acaba por partir à descoberta de si própria. Já a longa-metragem de B. François-Boucher Les lettres de la religieuse portugaise, apresenta-se como «comédie dramatique historique», numa deambulação entre o horizonte temporal de origem e o limiar do nosso tempo, explorando os meandros da paixão amorosa e o campo da sentimentalidade a partir do feminino, numa linha estética similar à de Ingmar Bergman.

Lanzelet und sein Schatten

Abstract Ulrich’s von Zatzikhoven ›Lanzelet‹ seems to be the only medieval version of the Lancelot myth without the adulterous love between the hero and the king’s wife or any other rivalry between King Arthur and the best knight of the Round Table. There are two possible explanations for that issue: Either the version of Ulrich’s romance is prior to the version represented by Chrétien’s de Troyes ›Chevalier de la Charrette‹ and the ›Prose Lancelot‹, or Ulrich’s romance avoids the adultery story on purpose. The present article argues for the second explanation, analysing the ›Lanzelet‹ as an intertextual play with the Lancelot myth, a play which does not simply cut the conflict out, but keeps alluding to it and re-narrates it on different levels (as a kind of ›Schattengeschichte‹). In doing so, the romance reveals the essentials of each Lancelot story as well as the narrative conditions under which the adultery story appears evitable or inevitable.

Testing Drugs and Attesting Cures: Pharmaceutical Monopolies and Military Contracts in Eighteenth-Century France.

This article explores the role of testing in the allocation of royal monopoly privileges for drugs in eighteenth-century France by following the multi-generational fortunes of a single "secret remedy" from 1713 to 1776: the poudre fébrifuge of the Chevalier de Guiller. On at least five occasions, this drug was tested on patients in order to decide whether it should be protected by a privilege and whether or not its vendors should be awarded lucrative contracts to supply it in bulk to the French military. Although efforts were made early in the century to test the drug through large-scale hospital trials and to relegate privilege granting to a bureaucratic commission, the case of the poudre fébrifuge instead suggests that military expediency and relatively small-scale trials administered personally by royal practitioners remained decisive in determining whether or not a drug received a monopoly privilege or a military contract.

“Pite renneth soone in gentil herte”: Ugly Feelings and Gendered Conduct in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women

Abstract This article reads the Legend of Good Women alongside two late-fourteenth-century conduct texts for women, the Livre du Chevalier de La Tour Landry and the Ménagier de Paris. It argues that the dysphoric emotional states felt by the Legend's women not only make erotic love illegible as an ennobling emotional experience, but also embody disturbing states of obstructed agency that threaten to undo established affective relations between the aesthetics of love and the social. In contrast, contemporary conduct texts for women construct emotion in ideologically satisfying ways by writing women good in their roles as wives and household managers, thereby providing a clearly legible alternative to fin' amor and its definitions of noble subjectivity.

The Chevalier de Lorraine as “Maître en Titre”

This article examines a major figure of the court of Louis XIV who has never received a full academic study. It demonstrates how a royal favourite in a same-sex context in the early modern period can be analysed in a similar manner to more well-known royal mistresses, or “maîtresses en titre”. It presents a thorough portrait of Prince Philippe of Lorraine, better known as the Chevalier de Lorraine, in the full context of his family (a cadet branch of the princely house of Lorraine), his friends (the household of Monsieur, Philippe, Duke of Orléans, brother of the king), and court culture more generally at the end of the seventeenth century. Such an analysis demonstrates a number of things: that, contrary to much recent scholarship on homosexual identities and relationships in the early modern period, long-term partnerships did exist, although they were unorthodox; and that, like other royal favourites, the Chevalier de Lorraine maintained his position at the top of a powerful court hierarchy through both the support of his family and a prominent patronage network. Patronage in particular is examined, citing both usages of clientage and brokerage, as the chief means for self-enrichment and survival at the court of France in this period. By the end of his life, the Chevalier de Lorraine had become one of the most successful courtiers due to the combined factors of his princely birth and continued support of this family, his long-term cultivation of his position as “maître en titre” of Monsieur, and the effective management of a large patronage network.

La contaminación en la tradición del Chevalier de la Charrette: el caso del manuscrito A

A partir de la edición del Chevalier de la Charrette de Chrétien de Troyes, en el haber Wendelin Foerster, y del examen del corpus manuscrito de esta obra por parte de Alexandre Micha, el presente artículo, escrito desde los presupuestos de la crítica neolachmanniana, saca a la luz varios casos de contaminación, incidiendo sobre todo en las relaciones del llamado manuscrito A con el resto de la tradición.

Ir Douwe Ehlhardt 1936 – 2016

With great sadness we have lost a good friend and scientist. On February 1, 2016 Ir Douwe Arnold Ehlhardt passed away in a hospital in Amsterdam at the age of almost 80 years. Douwe, born in Leeuwarden on February 18, 1936 graduated at Wageningen University in 1961. After completing his military service, he started in 1963 his professional career at the Cooperative Poultry Breeder Institute (CPI) in Nuland. Here Douwe became secretary of the scientific breeding committee to advice members of the layer breeder’s cooperative on genetic selection issues. In 1971 Douwe became senior scientist at the Spelderholt Centre for Poultry Research in Beekbergen with a special focus on turkey research. Following the fast increase in broiler meat consumption during the sixties it was believed that turkey meat consumption would follow the same trend. This made Douwe to decide to visit Prof Karl Nestor in Wooster (Ohio). In 1972 he went to the USA and worked together with Prof Nestor at his institute to improve his knowledge on breeding, hatching, feeding, housing and disease control of turkeys. Back in The Netherlands, Douwe became secretary of the Dutch Branch of WPSA, which position he held until 1977. In that year he went for two and a half years with his family to Naivasha in Kenya where he, on behalf of the Dutch Government, built an applied poultry research station. After returning to The Netherlands Douwe was asked to become secretary of the European Federation of WPSA, a position he accepted in 1981 and remained in until 1993. During these twelve years he was involved with the organisation of the 7th European Poultry Congress in Paris (France) in 1986 and the 8th European Poultry Congress in Barcelona (Spain). A few months after the congress in Paris, Douwe received the ‘Chevalier de l'Ordre du Merite Agricole’ during a special event at the Spelderholt Centre for Poultry Research. This high decoration, handed over by the French Ambassador in The Netherlands, was given to Douwe because of his great contribution to the conference. During the eighties the Dutch poultry industry received increasing numbers of public comments on how layers were held in cages. Animal protection groups and activists fought for animal rights. Following many difficult discussions between poultry behaviour scientists in the governmental Spelderholt Centre for Poultry Research, animal protection people and governmental officials as well as politicians, Douwe Ehlhardt initiated research on keeping birds in the aviary system. He had to solve many issues including cannibalism, handling manure (including nitrogen emissions), in-house climate conditions as well as preventing floor eggs. Since then most of these problems have been resolved and, following the ban on layer cages in 2012, provide layer farmers an opportunity to keep layers efficiently in non-cage systems. Today more than 80 % of the layers in The Netherlands are kept in aviary systems. In 1993 Douwe was asked by the Dutch government to lead a poultry development project in Saudi Arabia. He accepted the offer and spent two years in Riyadh at the Ministry of Agriculture solving poultry husbandry problems in Saudi Arabia. In 1995 he rejoined Spelderholt but had to move to Lelystad when research activities on ruminants, pigs and poultry were concentrated in one research institute called ID-DLO. He worked there till his retirement in 2001. Ir Douwe Ehlhardt contributed a great deal to poultry research in The Netherlands and worldwide. We have lost an integral scientist, a friend to his colleagues and fellowworkers and a man who, due to his language skills, made people laugh. We will sadly miss him.

‘Cela peut se dire au coin du feu, mais ne s’écrit pas’. The criticism of generals in eighteenth-century France

The eighteenth century witnessed an evolution in the way that critical opinions were expressed. Official publications on military history provided only slender commentaries on generals’ faults and failures. Objective remarks were not acceptable. However, the chevalier de Folard gave a new impulse to critics of French generals, having dared to criticize some who were still living. French difficulties during the War of the Austrian Succession and defeats during the Seven Years War encouraged the diffusion of these opinions, although they were mainly voiced in the private sphere. The French Revolution liberated such buried or hidden voices, with the end of censorship and of the official protection of the generals.

Narrating ‘finances’ after John Law: Complicity, critique, and the bonds of obligation in Duclos and Mouhy

Abstract Attending to the peculiar significance of finance(s) and the financier in Old Regime France, this article analyzes narratives that rehabilitate both, circa 1740-1755, in their political, social and biographical contexts. Positive representations are not thought to have been common. Yet following the Law debacle, restoration of traditional court finance resulted in effective administrative practices, universalizing policies and opportunities for merit, combined with money, to drive advancement, competing with hereditary privilege. Across genres, Charles Pinot-Duclos and Charles de Fieux, the Chevalier de Mouhy, depicted how upstart elites enact virtue, philanthropy and patriotism through finance. Their depictions reflected State policies and served common interests of writers and their protectors and patrons. Yet by emphasizing tensions in mid-century society, their texts also challenged readers to reflect critically on relations among finance, politics, society and indebtedness, anticipating a later focus on political economy as such. For today's readers grappling with dilemmas of modern finance, society and obligation, they provide provocative precedents.

Comment l’esprit vient aux filles… et comment les garçons le perdent : Maladie d’amour, médecine et fiction romanesque au XVIIIe siècle

This article proposes a commentary on a little known novel, Les Amours du chevalier de Faublas, written between 1787 and 1790 by Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvray. The objective is to show a rivalry that existed in the second half of the eighteenth century between the novel and medical treatises as ways to document knowledge of the human mind. Taking as a point of departure the problematic polysemy of the term “esprit” in the eighteenth century, this article reveals how Couvray’s novel engages in therapeutic writing. Its main hypothesis is that as a fictional narrative, the novel discusses the madness of love and the disturbances of the mind.

Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred. Barbara Newman. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Pp. xvi+399.

<i>Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred</i>. Barbara Newman. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Pp. xvi+399.

Vintilă Horia and Trans-Temporal Travel

Abstract The Romanian-born European writer Vintilă Horia - whose birth centenary is celebrated this year - was a genuine searcher of truth. His entire work pleads for transgressive-integrating knowledge, in opposition to binary logic and scientism; it is the privileged space of articulation between cognition, creation and gnosis, between the apophatism of science, mystic apofatism and artistic apofatism. Although much less known than the trilogy of exile - Dieu est né en exil (1960), Le chevalier de la résignation (1961) and ¡Perseguid a Boecio! (1983) - the small-sized novel Le voyage à San Marcos (1972) acts as an exemplary attestation to this pompous conjunction. The current article focuses especially on the text’s trans-temporal valence

Eskimos Enlightenment: Archeology of a clumsy view

The present paper retraces, in an ethno-historical perspective, the genesis of the oriented, elliptic, simplistic and reductive representation of the Eskimos in the Diderot &amp; d’Alembert’s Encyclopaedia. Adopting an inter-disciplinary approach (historical, anthropological and textual, as well), the paper wonders upon the mechanisms which have governed the construction of the Eskimos’ image, and deciphers them considering the philosophical challenges and the ideological conditioning of the Century of Lights. The Eskimos’ image conveyed by the Encyclopaedia emphasizes their bestiality and primitivism, to stick them as the prototype of the savagery, the personification of a degenerated and shy humanity of the borders. The image of the Inuit - stereotyped, preformed and caricatured - is built through bias, omissions, and generalizations. It is intended to present them as fully antonymic to civilisation. In the Diderot and Chevalier de Jaucourt’s writing, the fierce and anthropophagic Inuit are the archetypal symbol of an extreme and terrifying anthropological difference which is the outcome of a geographical and climatic determinism. Far away the highly idealized and aesthetically-oriented image of the Good Savage, the Eskimos show-up in the writing of the Century of Lights‟ scholars a borderline humanity, deprived of any culture mark, but, nevertheless belonging to the human family.

The Lapérouse Expedition and Geomagnetism: The Unexpected Discovery of Lamanon’s ‘Lost’ Letter and Ledru’s Instructions

In January 1787, on board Lapérouse's Boussole anchored off Macao, the chevalier de Lamanon wrote a letter to the marquis de Condorcet, the then permanent secretary of the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris. Lamanon's letter contained a summary of his magnetic observations made up to that point on Lapérouse's famous but ill-fated expedition. The letter, amongst other detail, included evidence that the Earth's magnetic field increased in intensity from the equator towards the poles. Sent to Condorcet via the then minister for the French Navy (the maréchal de Castries), the letter was subsequently lost, but not before it was copied. The copy, with early nineteenth-century ownership identified first to Nicolas Philippe Ledru and subsequently to Louis Isidore Duperrey, was itself then lost for over 150 years, but recently rediscovered bound-in with other manuscripts related to the Lapérouse expedition and terrestrial magnetism, including instructions by Ledru and remarks written in the 1830s and 1840s by Duperrey on Lamanon's letter and observations. The significance of Lamanon's letter and the Ledru and Duperrey manuscripts to the history of geomagnetism is discussed here. Duperrey's notes are transcribed in French for the first time and the Lamanon, Ledru and Duperrey manuscripts are translated into English, also for the first time.

Gabriel Richet (1916-2014).

Raymond A. Ardaillou1 and Pierre M. Ronco2,3 for the Tenon community 1National Academy of Medicine, Paris, France; 2Renal Medicine, University Pierre and Marie Curie, Paris, France and 3Department of Nephrology and Dialysis and INSERM 1155, Tenon Hospital, Paris, France Correspondence: Pierre M. Ronco, University Pierre and Marie Curie, INSERM Unit 702, 4 rue de la Chine, Tenon Hospital, F-75020 Paris, France. E-mail: pierre.ronco@tnn.aphp.fr B orn in 1916 during the First World War, Gabriel Richet was the fourth of a lineage of famous academic medical doctors, all professors at the Faculte de Medecine in Paris, including his grandfather Charles Richet, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1913 for the discovery of anaphylaxis. Gabriel Richet was 23 years old at the outbreak of the Second World War. He had just passed the highly competitive residency examination when he was enlisted in the French army and actively participated in the military campaign. After being a prisoner of war in Germany for a short period, he was released and resumed his activities as a physician in the Paris hospital system. During the German occupation all members of the Richet family were actively engaged in the resistance movement. His father, Charles Richet, was deported by the occupational forces to the concentration camp Dachau, his brother Olivier to Dora, and his cousin Jacqueline Richet-Souchere to Ravensbruck, and his mother, Marthe, was jailed at Fresnes outside of Paris. Soon after the liberation of Paris in 1944, Gabriel Richet enrolled in the army under the high command of General Leclerc, whose army freed Strasbourg in November 1944. In the first months of 1945, fights continued in the area of Colmar in the south of Alsace where Gabriel Richet was active as a doctor of the French commandos. He was injured, received three military citations, and was decorated with the award of Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur by General de Gaulle in April 1945. Demobilized from the army, Gabriel Richet joined the department of Louis Pasteur ValleryRadot, where he met Jean Hamburger, whom he followed to Necker Hospital to establish in 1950 the first French department of nephrology. He worked together with Jean Hamburger for 10 years, and both are considered to rank among the postwar rebuilders of French academic medicine. At Necker Hospital, Richet introduced treatment of acute kidney injury with the artificial kidney, which dramatically improved the prognosis of acute kidney failure associated with sepsis and crush syndrome. Together with the other members of the team of Jean Hamburger, Gabriel Richet was a leading investigator contributing to the worldwide reputation of the Necker ne phrology department. He was involved in the first allogenic kidney transplantation from a mother to her son, opening up exciting new therapeutic perspectives in living related transplantation. Introducing the percutaneous kidney biopsy pioneered by Claus Brun, Richet together with Hamburger contributed to the routine histological diagnosis of glomerular diseases, including the first studies by electron microscopy. The Necker team also demonstrated that most patients with advanced renal failure died from serious electrolyte changes rather than from retention of waste products such as urea. This led Richet together with Jean Hamburger and Jean Crosnier to develop the concept of renal intensive care aimed at correcting disorders of the major fluid, electrolyte, acid–base, and other metabolic functions, thereby markedly improving the prognosis of acute renal failure. In 1961, Gabriel Richet was appointed chief of nephrology at Tenon Hospital, at that time an inconspicuous city hospital in the middle of nowhere. He immediately set out to create a clinical and research nephrology center by recruiting a team that initially included Claude Amiel, Raymond Ardaillou, and Liliane Morel-Maroger. This team was then joined by Francoise Mignon, JeanDaniel Sraer, Pierre Verroust, Pierre Ronco, Eric Rondeau, and many others. This nephrology center was made possible by a new hospital wing supported by the French state through the Assistance Publique–Hopitaux de Paris and by INSERM (the French equivalent of the US National Institutes of Health), the University of Paris, the Association Claude Bernard, and the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research), which also supported the research. Thereby Gabriel Richet succeeded in his goal of making the nephrology center at Tenon Hospital a place of national and international excellence for renal diseases as well as an intellectual haven, a foyer intellectuel, as he used to call it. The success could be measured by the large number of fellows and visiting faculty from countries all over the world who trained or did research in this multilingual and multicultural Tenon community, a virtual nephrological tower of Babel. Gabriel Richet provided a unique atmosphere of intellecGabriel Richet (1916–2014)

Chevalier de la Camara (1829–1884), first Spanish botanist in Australia

Chevalier de la Camara was a collector of plants in Australia in the 1870s and 1880s, and at least three species were named in his honour. However, nothing has been recorded of his life or work. In this paper as much as can be gleaned about him is set out, including his origins, birth, marriage, family, honours, botanical and agricultural activities, and death.