Gauthier

Gauthier is not a French word. It is a Germanic compound, wald, rule, joined to hari, army: the ruler of the army. That is not where the bulk of French given names come from. Gauthier belongs to an older layer, the two-element war-names of the Germanic peoples, kept in daily use by people speaking a language built out of Latin.

The whole layer behaves the same way. These names record no trade, no village and no feature of a man's face; each is a pair of nouns bolted into a boast about command or arms, and the men who inherited them had usually never gone near an army. The name's own French forms are Gauthier and Gautier; the same compound is Walter in English and Walther in German, one name worn across three tongues.

Family names came into use in western Europe only in the eleventh century, and the largest class of them was made this way: a father's given name stops changing between generations and becomes the family's property. Gauthier came through that door with nothing attached to it.

Gauthier's stock split along its spelling rather than its sound. Gauthier and Gautier are the same name under different pens, and almost every documented bearer below signed himself Gautier. All of them carry wald and hari.

A name can also be set aside without being lost. The singer Mylene Farmer, born in 1961, was born Gautier.

Pierre Jules Theophile Gautier was born at Tarbes, in the Hautes-Pyrenees, on 30 August 1811, son of Jean-Pierre Gautier, a cultivated minor government official, and Antoinette-Adelaide Cocard. The family moved to Paris in 1814, to the old Marais. He lasted three months at the College Louis-le-Grand before illness sent him home and finished at the College Charlemagne, but his most significant instruction, Latin included, came from his father.

At school he met Gerard de Nerval, who introduced him to Victor Hugo, then the leading dramatist in France. The premiere of Hugo's Hernani is the scene Gautier is still remembered in: he turned up in an anachronistic red doublet, and the coat did more for his name than his verse had. His first collection, Poesies, forty-two poems written at eighteen, appeared during the July Revolution of 1830, sold nothing and was withdrawn. From late that year he was at Le Petit Cenacle, the circle that met in Jehan Du Seigneur's studio.

Journalism paid for everything else. Emile de Girardin hired him at La Presse in 1836 as art and theatre columnist, and copy was the shape of his working life from then on: nearly seventy pieces to Le Figaro alongside it, and about a hundred articles in nine months of 1848. He directed the Revue de Paris from 1851 to 1856 and took the editorship of L'Artiste in 1856, preaching art for art's sake in its editorials. Mademoiselle de Maupin came in 1835, Emaux et Camees in 1852, and Le Capitaine Fracasse, promised in 1836, only in 1863.

The scenario of Giselle came out of the same years, one of the foundation works of the ballet repertoire, written for Carlotta Grisi, who was the great love of his life and refused him; he had two daughters with her sister Ernesta, one of them the author Judith Gautier. The French Academy rejected him in 1867, 1868 and 1869; nobody else did. Sainte-Beuve gave his collected works three major articles in 1863, he chaired the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts from 1862 with Delacroix, Manet and Dore on his committee, Baudelaire dedicated Les Fleurs du mal to him, and it was Gautier who coined poete maudit for Verlaine. He died on 23 October 1872, aged sixty-one, and was buried at Montmartre.

Jean Alfred Gautier was born at Cologny in the canton of Geneva in July 1793, son of the merchant Francois Gautier and of Marie de Tournes. He took a doctorate in celestial mechanics at Paris in 1817 with a thesis on the problem of three bodies, under Laplace, Lagrange and Legendre, and in 1818 was received in England by John Herschel. From 1821 he held the chair of higher mathematics at Geneva and the directorship of its observatory, the third man in the post; he put up a new observatory in 1830 with a Gambey equatorial and a meridian circle in it.

Failing eyesight ended the career in 1839 and he handed the observatory to his pupil Emile Plantamour. It did not end the work. Reading Rudolf Wolf and Johann von Lamont, he was the first to notice a parallel between activity on the sun and magnetic activity at the surface of the earth, and in 1852, within a year of Schwabe's results, Gautier, Edward Sabine, Wolf and Lamont announced independently that the sunspot cycle and the geomagnetic cycle ran on the same period. He died at Geneva on 30 November 1881, aged eighty-eight.

Paul Ferdinand Gautier, born on 12 October 1842 into a modest Parisian family, was taken out of school at thirteen and apprenticed. At eighteen he joined Secretan under William Eichens, and the two helped set up Leon Foucault's reflecting telescope at Marseille in 1863. He followed Eichens into his own company in 1866, opened his own workshop about ten years later, showed a dividing engine at the Paris exhibition of 1878, and in 1881 bought Eichens' firm outright.

He built the coude equatorials designed by Maurice Loewy, and many observatories taking part in the Carte du Ciel from 1887 did so with instruments out of his shop. At his height in 1900 he had forty people on the boulevard Arago and had delivered seventeen equatorials, seven coudes, three refractors, seven meridian circles, five siderostats, three azimuth telescopes and thirteen astrographs.

The same year almost undid him. A giant refractor with a lens 132 centimetres across, built for the 1900 exhibition and financed by the politician Francois Deloncle, was never placed in a suitable location and never properly paid for, and nearly destroyed the company. He was made a knight of the Legion of Honour in 1889; the firm was sold the year after his death.

Horace Charles Victor Gautier was born at Geneva in 1824, began medicine at Zurich in 1841, went on to Paris in 1843 and took his doctorate in 1850. Back in Geneva he practised every branch of medicine at once, a consultant in obscure cases, a surgeon and an authority on obstetrics and gynaecology, and was for years medical director of the Plainpalais Infirmary for Women and Children.

His 1867 paper on the principal cause of accidents following surgical operations, and on preventing them, was blunt. The sponges, the dressings and the basins must be washed and disinfected every time they have been used; before the operation the surgeon and each assistant should wash their hands with chlorinated water, soap and a brush. He is reckoned a precursor of Joseph Lister in surgical antisepsis. He had been president of the Medical Society of Geneva in 1858, and died there on 11 January 1890.

Louis Gautier was born at Aigre in the Charente on 22 January 1810, made his living there as an eau de vie merchant and sat as a district councillor. His route into national politics ran through the Andre family, whose Bonapartist sympathies he shared, and he did not stand for the legislature until 1876.

Elected deputy for the Charente on 5 March 1876, he took his seat with the Appel au peuple group, never took part in a debate, and voted with the conservative minority, including for the government in the crisis of 16 May 1877. He was returned again on 14 October 1877 as a Bonapartist and official candidate, resigned on 15 November 1879, and his son Rene Francois Gautier was elected in his place on 29 February 1880. He died at Fouqueure on 26 January 1884.