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Out of the Diaries: 22 January 1761
On 22 January 1761, the French astronomer Chappe d’Auteroche arrived in Warsaw. He was on his way to Tobolsk in Russia – a dangerous journey across war-torn Europe. The weather had been dreadful – when incessant rain had turned the roads into mud, he had then swapped his carriage for a boat but thick fog allowed them only to travel during the day. All the while the celestial clock was ticking.
The journey had been beset with problems. In Vienna he had bought a new carriage and on 10 January, the fateful day that Mason and Dixon’s ship was attacked by the French and Pingré zigzagged across the ocean to escape the British, Chappe’s carriage (including half a ton of instruments) had crashed into an icy ditch somewhere between Brno and Nový Jičín, in today’s Czech Republic. It had taken hours of pulling and shoving to free the battered vehicle. Chappe had enough. It had been the first time that the usually optimistic Chappe allowed himself to contemplate defeat. ‘I began to fear’, he wrote in his diary, that ‘we should not reach Tobolsky in due time’. Tobolsk was one of the most important locations because the entire transit would be visible and would be at its shortest – making Siberia the perfect counterpart to the longer transits in the East Indies (for example Bengkulu where Mason and Dixon had been dispatched to).
While his colleague Le Gentil was suffering the humid heat in Mauritius, Chappe endured a cold he ‘had not before experienced’. Even inside the carriage the temperatures were so low that he fumbled out his thermometer with numb fingers and scrawled in his journal ‘eleven degrees below 0’. The jovial Chappe was delighted when they finally arrived in Warsaw where he was welcomed in style. It was the season of the carnival – a ‘season devoted to pleasure’, as Chappe noted – and the French astronomer attended a great many festivities with the Polish aristocracy. The French ambassador even introduce Chappe to the King of Poland.
Chappe’s diary entries from Warsaw show that he was not only an astronomer but also a connoisseur of women – describing in detail their dress and ‘undress’. No matter how difficult his voyages, he always found time to investigate women with the taxonomic precision of a scientist. No matter how cold or exhausted he was, he remained an expert of the female sex and remarked appreciatively on their sparking eyes, the ‘slenderness of their waists’, and ‘well-shaped servant maids’. The women in Warsaw, he declared, were beautiful and sociable but also ‘strictly virtuous’.