I've never believed in luck. It's true, however, that life is full of caprices. Although the laws of physics are rigorously enforced in all jurisdictions, the bigger picture often seems to be chaotic. I think a lot of people put too much stock in superstitious beliefs about good (or bad) luck; I much more tend to agree with Thomas Jefferson, who famously said, "I've found that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have."
Still, sometimes you read about what some people have gone through, and you can't help coming away with the feeling that the stars must have been misaligned when they were born. Their lives are just one disaster after another -- and I choose the word deliberately, because disaster comes from Latin words meaning "bad stars," and the specific example I'm thinking of was an eighteenth-century French astronomer who just could not catch a break.
His full name was Guillaume Joseph Hyacinthe Jean-Baptiste Le Gentil de la Galeisière, but historians of science know him as Guillaume Le Gentil. He was born in September of 1725 in Coutances, and was inspired to study astronomy after hearing a lecture by the famous astronomer, cartographer, and world traveler Joseph-Nicolas Delisle. After receiving his bachelor's degree in the subject, he threw himself into research with great gusto. He discovered the Pinwheel Cluster (Messier 36), the Starfish Cluster (Messier 38), and a dark nebula in the constellation Cygnus that is now called Le Gentil 3 in his honor.
Just about everything else he attempted, however, was... a disaster.
In 1760, Russian polymath Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonsov came up with a method for refining the length of the Astronomical Unit (A.U.), the distance between the Earth and the Sun, by making careful measurements from various locations of the transit of Venus -- the apparent movement of the silhouette of Venus across the face of the Sun at the point when the Earth, Venus, and the Sun are all lined up. Le Gentil, who had already done some work on this question, joined the French team working on the project, and was dispatched to Pondicherry, India, then a French colonial possession, where he'd been given permission by the king to set up an observatory.
Before Le Gentil's ship could get him there, though, the Seven Years' War broke out. As different parts of India, and the islands of the Indian Ocean, were under the control of France and Britain, and those were on opposite sides of the conflict, ship travel in the region was iffy at best. Le Gentil got stranded on Mauritius, and had a hell of a time finding anyone who would get him to India in time for the transit (6 June 1761). He finally found a frigate whose captain said he'd get him to Coromandel, India, and from there Le Gentil could get another ship to Pondicherry in plenty of time -- but the first ship was first blown off course for five weeks, and then by the time they got to Coromandel they found out that Pondicherry had been taken by the British and they weren't allowing any French citizens to land there.
So Le Gentil had no choice but to return to Mauritius. The transit took place while he was on board ship -- the weather was clear, but the seas were so rough and the ship pitching so wildly that he couldn't take any measurements from on board.
No worries, Le Gentil thought; because of the geometry of the orbits of Earth and Venus, Venusian transits come in pairs, eight years apart. (Each pair, though, is separated by over a century.) He decided to try and get measurements for the 1769 transit in Manila, Philippines, but the Spanish authorities weren't keen, so he went back to giving a go at Pondicherry again, which had been returned to French control in 1763. He got there in 1768, built a special observatory to do his measurements, got everything ready...
... then the day of the transit, the clouds rolled in.
He was now zero for two.
Licking his wounds, he decided to return to France, but fate wasn't done yet. The crew and passengers of his ship were struck by dysentery, and forced to put in on Réunion Island so they could recover. (And, presumably, clean the ship.) While in port, the ship was damaged in a storm and declared un-seaworthy, so once again he was stranded. Finally he found a Spanish ship that was willing to take him home, and he arrived home in Paris in October of 1771, eleven years after he'd left for what was supposed to be an absence of a year or so.
When he got there, he found that much like Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, he'd been declared legally dead. Not a single one of the letters he'd sent home during his voyage had arrived. His wife had remarried, his estate had been plundered, and his seat at the Royal Academy of Sciences given to someone else. He ended up in court for years trying to (1) prove he was actually still alive and wasn't an impostor, (2) get some of his belongings back, and (3) get re-appointed to the Academy. (Eventually the king himself had to intervene to force the Academy to accept him again -- and also, to allow him to remarry without being guilty of bigamy.)
What's most remarkable about Le Gentil is that he seems to have lived up to his name (gentil is French for "friendly" or "kind"). He wrote a memoir with the cumbersome title Voyage dans les mers de l'Inde, fait par ordre du Roi, à l'occasion du passage de Vénus, sur le disque du Soleil, le 6 juin 1761 & le 3 du même mois 1769 par M. Le Gentil, de l'académie royale des sciences ("Voyage to the Indian Ocean, by Order of the King, for the Occasion of the Passage of Venus Across the Disk of the Sun, 6 June 1761 and the 3rd of the Same Month 1769, by Monsieur Le Gentil, of the Royal Academy of Sciences"). In it, you very much get the impression that Le Gentil had an "Oh, well, ha-ha, that's the way it goes" attitude toward all of his troubles; he never does what I would have done after the second setback, which is to scream "For fuck's sake, what now?" and start throwing heavy objects.
Guillaume Le Gentil died in Paris in October of 1792, at the age of 67. This, in fact, might have been the best stroke of luck he ever had; he missed by only a few months the start of the horrific Reign of Terror, which -- to judge by the fate of poor, doomed Antoine Lavoisier -- had little respect for scientists.
Reading about Le Gentil's life, you have to wonder how one person could have such continual misfortune. It reminds me of the line from Calvin & Hobbes, where Calvin's mom tells him, "Life is unfair," and Calvin responds, "I know, but why can't it ever be unfair in my favor?" It sure seems like Le Gentil was on the receiving end of way too many bad turns of fate. Even if I don't attribute it to his literally being ill-starred from birth, I can't help but feel a combination of pity and admiration for someone who kept doggedly persevering despite just about everything going wrong.
And maybe his tale of woe will also put things into perspective next time you think you're having a bad day.
