Mélanie de Salignac

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Mélanie de Salignac (born January 19, 1744 in Marennes , Charente-Maritime, † 1766 ) was a young, blind French woman who is described in Diderot's Addition à la lettre sur les aveugles (1782) to his essay Letter on the Blind . The additions did not appear until 1782 in Friedrich Melchior Grimm's and Jacques-Henri Meister's handwritten Correspondance littéraire .

Life

Mélanie was the daughter of the financier Pierre Vallet de Salignac († 1760) and Sophie Volland's older sister Marie-Jeanne Élisabeth Volland (* 1715). Her older brother was the politician Nicolas-Thérèse Vallet de Salignac . Denis Diderot was close friends with Mélanie and her family from 1760 to 1763.

Melanie was blind at the age of two. She learned to read with the help of paper cards with raised letters; she had learned to read notes in the same way. After a short time she was able to play music texts by heart on the viola. She had a good knowledge of geometry, algebra and astronomy. Diderot relates: “She wrote with a pin and pricked letters on her sheet of paper. This was stretched in a frame, over which two movable parallel rails ran, leaving only as much space as two lines. "

Mélanie died at the age of only 22.

swell

  • Denis Diderot: Addendum to the letter about the blind . In: Diderot: Philosophische Schriften , Vol. 1. From d. Franz. Transl. By Theodor Lücke. Berlin 1961.

literature

  • Kai Nonnenmacher: The black light of modernity. On the aesthetic history of blindness. De Gruyter (2006) ISBN 3-4846-3034-5

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Zina Weygand: The Blind in French Society from the Middle Ages to the Century of Louis Braille . Stanford 2009.
  2. ↑ Family genealogy
  3. ^ Diderot: Addendum. 1961, p. 107.
personal data
SURNAME Salignac, Mélanie de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French blind people
DATE OF BIRTH January 19, 1744
PLACE OF BIRTH Marennes (Charente-Maritime)
DATE OF DEATH 1766