OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Erpenius, Thomas

See also Thomas van Erpe on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​ERPENIUS (original name van Erpe), THOMAS (1584–1624), Dutch Orientalist, was born at Gorcum, in Holland, on the 11th of September 1584. After completing his early education at Leiden, he entered the university of that city, and in 1608 took the degree of master of arts. By the advice of Scaliger he studied Oriental languages whilst taking his course of theology. He afterwards travelled in England, France, Italy and Germany, forming connexions with learned men, and availing himself of the information which they communicated. During his stay at Paris he contracted a friendship with Casaubon, which lasted during his life, and also took lessons in Arabic from an Egyptian, Joseph Barbatus, otherwise called Abu-dakni. At Venice he perfected himself in the Turkish, Persic and Ethiopic languages. After a long absence, Erpenius returned to his own country in 1612, and on the 10th of February 1613 he was appointed professor of Arabic and other Oriental languages, Hebrew excepted, in the university of Leiden. Soon after his settlement at Leiden, animated by the example of Savary de Brèves, who had established an Arabic press at Paris at his own charge, he caused new Arabic characters to be cut at a great expense, and erected a press in his own house. In 1619 the curators of the university of Leiden ​instituted a second chair of Hebrew in his favour. In 1620 he was sent by the States of Holland to induce Pierre Dumoulin or André Rivet to settle in that country; and after a second journey he was successful in inducing Rivet to comply with their request. Some time after the return of Erpenius, the states appointed him their interpreter; and in this capacity he had the duty imposed upon him of translating and replying to the different letters of the Moslem princes of Asia and Africa. His reputation had now spread throughout all Europe, and several princes, the kings of England and Spain, and the archbishop of Seville made him the most flattering offers; but he constantly refused to leave his native country. He was preparing an edition of the Koran with a Latin translation and notes, and was projecting an Oriental library, when he died prematurely on the 13th of November 1624.
Among his works may be mentioned his Grammatica Arabica, published originally in 1613 and often reprinted; Rudimenta linguae Arabicae (1620); Grammatica Ebraea generalis (1621); Grammatica Chaldaica et Syria (1628); and an edition of Elmacin’s History of the Saracens.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Ernest I.

See also Ernest I, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​ERNEST I. [Ernst Anton Karl Ludwig], duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (1784–1844), was the son of Francis, duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, and was born on the 2nd of January 1784. At the time of his father’s death (9th of December 1806) the duchy of Coburg was occupied by Napoleon as conquered territory, and Ernest did not come into his inheritance till after the peace of Tilsit (July 1807). Owing to the part he had played in assisting the Prussians at the battle of Auerstädt he continued out of favour with Napoleon, and he threw himself with vigour into the war of liberation against the French. After the battle of Leipzig he was given the command of the V. army corps and reduced Mainz by blockade; he also commanded the Saxon troops during the campaign of 1815. By the congress of Vienna he was rewarded with the principality of Lichtenberg on the left bank of the Rhine, which received a slight augmentation after the second peace of Paris. These territories he sold to Prussia in 1834. In 1826, in the division of the territories of the duchy of Saxe-Gotha which followed the death of its last duke (February 1825), he received the duchy of Gotha, ceding that of Saalfeld to the duke of Meiningen; and he now exchanged his style of Ernest III. of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld for that of Ernest I. of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. In 1821 he had given a constitution to Coburg, but he did not interfere with the traditional system of estates at Gotha. He died on the 29th of January 1844.
Duke Ernest, who was not only a good soldier and keen sportsman, but an enlightened patron of the arts and sciences, did much for the economic, educational and constitutional development of his territories; and his advice always carried great weight in the councils of the other German sovereigns. It was, however, for the splendid international position attained by the house of Coburg under him that his reign is chiefly distinguished. His younger brother Leopold (q.v.) became king of the Belgians; his brother Ferdinand (b. 1785) married the wealthy princess Antoinette von Kohary (1816) and was the father of the duchess of Nemours and of the future King Ferdinand of Portugal. Of his sisters, Antoinette (1779–1824) married Duke Alexander of Württemberg; Juliane [Alexandra Feodorovna] (1781–1860) married the Russian cesarevich Constantine, from whom she was, however, divorced in 1820; and Victoria (1786–1861), wife of Edward Augustus, duke of Kent, became the mother of Queen Victoria. Duke Ernest was twice married: (1) in 1817 to Louise, daughter of Duke Augustus of Saxe-Gotha, whom he finally divorced in 1826; (2) in 1831 to Maria, daughter of Duke Alexander of Württemberg. Of his sons, by his first wife, Ernest succeeded him in the duchy, and Albert married Queen Victoria.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Ernst, Heinrich Wilhelm

See also Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​ERNST, HEINRICH WILHELM (1814–1865), German violinist and composer, was born at Brünn, in Moravia, in 1814. He was educated at the Conservatorium of Vienna, studying the violin under Joseph Böhm and Joseph Mayseder, and composition under Ignaz von Seyfried. At the age of sixteen he made a concert tour in south Germany, which established his reputation as a violinist of the highest promise. In 1832 he went to Paris, where he lived for several years. During this period he formed an intimacy with Stephen Heller, which resulted in their charming joint compositions—the Pensées fugitives for piano and violin. In 1843 he paid his first visit to London. The impression which he then made as a violinist was more than confirmed in the following year, when his rare powers were recognized by the musical public. Thenceforward he visited England nearly every year, until his health broke down owing to long-continued neuralgia of a most severe kind. The last seven years of his life were spent in retirement, chiefly at Nice, where he died on the 8th of October 1865. As a violinist Ernst was distinguished by his almost unrivalled executive power, loftiness of conception, and intensely passionate expression. As a composer he wrote chiefly for his own instrument, and his Elegie and Otello Fantasia rank among the most treasured works for the violin.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Eros (planet)

See also 433 Eros on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​EROS, a minor planet discovered by Witt at Berlin on the 14th of August 1898, and, so far as yet known, unique in that its perihelion lies far within the orbit of Mars.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Le Maçon, Robert

See also Robert le Maçon on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​LE MAÇON (or Le Masson), ROBERT (c. 1365–1443), chancellor of France, was born at Château du Loir, Sarthe. He was ennobled in March 1401, and became six years later a councillor of Louis II., duke of Anjou and king of Sicily. A partisan of the house of Orleans, he was appointed chancellor to Isabella of Bavaria on the 29th of January 1414, on the 20th of July commissary of the mint, and in June 1416 chancellor to the count of Ponthieu, afterwards Charles VII. On the 16th of August he bought the barony of Trèves in Anjou, and henceforward bore the title of seigneur of Trèves. When Paris was surprised by the Burgundians on the night of the 29th of May 1418 he assisted Tanguy Duchâtel in saving the dauphin. His devotion to the cause of the latter having brought down on him the wrath of John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, he was excluded from the political amnesty known as the peace of Saint Maur des Fossés, though he retained his seat on the king’s council. He was by the dauphin’s side when John the Fearless was murdered at the bridge of Montereau on the 10th of September 1419. He resigned the seals at the beginning of 1422; but he continued to exercise great influence, and in 1426 he effected a reconciliation between the king and the duke of Brittany. Having been captured by Jean de Langeac, seneschal of Auvergne, in August of the same year, he was shut up for three months in the château of Usson. When set at liberty he returned to court, where he staunchly supported Joan of Arc against all the cabals that menaced her. It was he who signed the patent of nobility for the Arc family in December 1429. In 1430 he was once more entrusted with an embassy to Brittany. Having retired from political life in 1436, he died on the 28th of January 1443, and was interred at Trèves, where his epitaph may still be seen.
See C. Bourcier, “Robert le Masson,” in the Revue historique de l’Anjou (1873); and the Nouvelle biographie générale, vol. xxx. (J. V.*)
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Le Fèvre, Jean

See also Jean Le Fèvre de Saint-Remy on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​LE FÈVRE, JEAN (c. 1395–1468), Burgundian chronicler and seigneur of Saint Remy, is also known as Toison d’or from his long connexion with the order of the Golden Fleece. Of noble birth, he adopted the profession of arms and with other Burgundians fought in the English ranks at Agincourt. In 1430, on the foundation of the order of the Golden Fleece by Philip III. the Good, duke of Burgundy, Le Fèvre was appointed its king of arms and he soon became a very influential person at the Burgundian court. He frequently assisted Philip in conducting negotiations with foreign powers, and he was an arbiter in tournaments and on all questions of chivalry, where his wide knowledge of heraldry was highly useful. He died at Bruges on the 16th of June 1468.
Le Fèvre wrote a Chronique, or Histoire de Charles VI., roy de France. The greater part of this chronicle is merely a copy of the work of Enguerrand de Monstrelet, but Le Fèvre is an original authority for the years between 1428 and 1436 and makes some valuable additions to our knowledge, especially about the chivalry of the Burgundian court. He is more concise than Monstrelet, but is equally partial to the dukes of Burgundy. The Chronique has been edited by F. Morand for the Société de l’histoire de France (Paris, 1876). Le Fèvre is usually regarded as the author of the Livre des faites de Jacques de Lalaing.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Le Maire de Belges, Jean

See also Jean Lemaire de Belges on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​LE MAIRE DE BELGES, JEAN (1473–c. 1525), French poet and historiographer, was born at Bavai in Hainault. He was a nephew of Jean Molinet, and spent some time with him at Valenciennes, where the elder writer held a kind of academy of poetry. Le Maire in his first poems calls himself a disciple of Molinet. In certain aspects he does belong to the school of the grands rhétoriqueurs, but his great merit as a poet is that he emancipated himself from the affectations and puerilities of his masters. This independence of the Flemish school he owed in part perhaps to his studies at the university of Paris and to the study of the Italian poets at Lyons, a centre of the French renascence. In 1503 he was attached to the court of Margaret of Austria, duchess of Savoy, afterwards regent of the Netherlands. For this princess he undertook more than one mission to Rome; he became her librarian and a canon of Valenciennes. To her were addressed his most original poems, Epistres de l’amand verd, the amant vert being a green parrot belonging to his patroness. Le Maire gradually became more French in his sympathies, eventually entering the service of Anne of Brittany. His prose Illustrations des Gaules et singularitez de Troye (1510–1512), largely adapted from Benoît de Sainte More, connects the Burgundian royal house with Hector. Le Maire probably died before 1525. Étienne Pasquier, Ronsard and Du Bellay all acknowledged their indebtedness to him. In his love for antiquity, his sense of rhythm, and even the peculiarities of his vocabulary he anticipated the Pléiade.
His works were edited in 1882–1885 by J. Stecher, who wrote the article on him in the Biographie nationale de Belgique.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Le Marchant, John Gaspard

See also John Le Marchant (British Army officer, born 1766) on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​LE MARCHANT, JOHN GASPARD (1766–1812), English major-general, was the son of an officer of dragoons, John Le Marchant, a member of an old Guernsey family. After a somewhat wild youth, Le Marchant, who entered the army in 1781, attained the rank of lieutenant-colonel in 1797. Two years before this he had designed a new cavalry sword; and in 1801 his scheme for establishing at High Wycombe and Great Marlow schools for the military instruction of officers was sanctioned by Parliament, and a grant of £30,000 was voted for the “royal military college,” the two original departments being afterwards combined and removed to Sandhurst. Le Marchant was the first lieutenant-governor, and during the nine years that he held this appointment he trained many officers who served with distinction under Wellington in the Peninsula. Le Marchant himself was given the command of a cavalry brigade in 1810, and greatly distinguished himself in several actions, being killed at the battle of Salamanca on the 22nd of July 1812, after the charge of his brigade had had an important share in the English victory. He wrote several treatises on cavalry tactics and other military subjects, but few of them were published. By his wife, Mary, daughter of John Carey of Guernsey, Le Marchant had four sons and six daughters.
His second son, Sir Denis Le Marchant, Bart. (1795–1874), was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, and was called to the bar in 1823. In 1830 he became secretary to Lord Chancellor Brougham, and in the Reform Bill debates made himself exceedingly useful to the ministers. Having been secretary to the board of trade from 1836 to 1841, he was created a baronet in 1841. He entered the House of Commons in 1846, and was under secretary for the home department in the government of Lord John Russell. He was chief clerk of the House of Commons from 1850 to 1871. He published a Life of his father in 1841, and began a Life of Lord Althorpe which was completed after his death by his son; he also edited Horace Walpole’s Memoirs of the Reign of George III. (1845). Sir Denis Le Marchant died in London on the 30th of October 1874.
The third son of General Le Marchant, Sir John Gaspard Le Marchant (1803–1874), entered the English army, and saw service in Spain in the Carlist War of 1835–37. He was afterwards lieutenant-governor of Newfoundland (1847–1852) and of Nova Scotia (1852–1857); governor of Malta (1859–1864); commander-in-chief at Madras (1865–1868). He was made K.C.B. in 1865, and died on the 6th of February 1874.
See Sir Denis Le Marchant, Memoirs of General Le Marchant (1841); Sir William Napier, History of the War in the Peninsula (6 vols., 1828–1840).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Le Play, Pierre Guillaume Frédéric

See also Pierre Guillaume Frédéric le Play on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​LE PLAY, PIERRE GUILLAUME FRÉDÉRIC (1806–1882), French engineer and economist, was born at La Rivière-Saint-Sauveur (Calvados) on the 11th of April 1806, the son of a custom-house official. He was educated at the École Polytechnique, and from there passed into the State Department of Mines. In 1834 he was appointed head of the permanent committee of mining statistics, and in 1840 engineer-in-chief and professor of metallurgy at the school of mines, where he became inspector in 1848. For nearly a quarter of a century Le Play spent his vacations travelling in the various countries of Europe, and collected a vast quantity of material bearing upon the social condition of the working classes. In 1855 he published Les Ouvriers européens, which comprised a series of thirty-six monographs on the budgets of typical families selected from the most diverse industries. The Académie des Sciences conferred on him the Montyon prize. Napoleon III., who held him in high esteem, entrusted him with the organization of the Exhibition of 1855, and appointed him counsellor of state, commissioner general of the Exhibition of 1867, senator of the empire and grand officer of the Legion of Honour. He died in Paris on the 5th of April 1882.
In 1856 Le Play founded the Société internationale des études pratiques d’Économie sociale, which has devoted its energies principally to forwarding social studies on the lines laid down by its founder. The journal of the society, La Réforme sociale, founded in 1881, is published fortnightly. Other works of Le Play are La Réforme sociale (2 vols., 1864; 7th ed., 3 vols., 1887); L’Organisation de la famille (1871); La Constitution de l’Angleterre (in collaboration with M. Delaire, 1875). See article in Harvard Quarterly Journal of Economics (June 1890), by H. Higgs.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Le Pautre, Jean

See also Jean Le Pautre on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​LE PAUTRE, JEAN (1618–1682), French designer and engraver. He was apprenticed to a carpenter and builder and in addition to learning mechanical and constructive work developed considerable facility with the pencil. His designs, which were innumerable in quantity and exuberant in fancy, consisted mainly of ceilings, friezes, chimney-pieces, doorways and mural decorations; he also devised fire-dogs, sideboards, cabinets, console tables, mirrors and other pieces of furniture; he was long employed at the Gobelins. His work is often excessively flamboyant and over-elaborate; he revelled in amorini and swags, arabesques and cartouches. His chimney-pieces, however, were frequently simple and elegant. His engraved plates, almost entirely original, are something like 1500 in number and include a portrait of himself. He became a member of the academy of Paris in 1677.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Le Gallienne, Richard

See also Richard Le Gallienne on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​LE GALLIENNE, RICHARD (1866– ), English poet and critic, was born in Liverpool on the 20th of January 1866. He started life in a business office in Liverpool, but abandoned this to turn author. My Lady’s Sonnets appeared at Liverpool in 1887, and in 1889 he became for a short time literary secretary to Wilson Barrett. In the same year he published Volumes in Folio, The Book Bills of Narcissus and George Meredith: some Characteristics (new ed., 1900). He joined the staff of the Star in 1891, and wrote for various papers over the signature of “Logroller.” English Poems (1892), R. L. Stevenson and other Poems (1895), a paraphrase (1897) of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, and Odes from the Divan of Hafiz (1903), contained some light, graceful verse, but he is best known by the fantastic prose essays and sketches of Prose Fancies (2 series, 1894–1896), Sleeping Beauty and other Prose Fancies (1900), The Religion of a Literary Man (1893), The Quest of the Golden Girl (1897), The Life Romantic (1901), &c. His first wife, Mildred Lee, died in 1894, and in 1897 he married Julie Norregard, subsequently taking up his residence in the United States. In 1906 he translated, from the Danish, Peter Nansen’s Love’s Trilogy.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Le Nain

See also Le Nain on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​LE NAIN, the name of three brothers, Louis, Antoine and Mathieu, who occupy a peculiar position in the history of French art. Although they figure amongst the original members of the French Academy, their works show no trace of the influences which prevailed when that body was founded. Their sober execution and choice of colour recall characteristics of the Spanish school, and when the world of Paris was busy with mythological allegories, and the “heroic deeds” of the king, the three Le Nain devoted themselves chiefly to subjects of humble life such as “Boys Playing Cards,” “The Forge,” or “The Peasants’ Meal.” These three paintings are now in the Louvre; various others may be found in local collections, and some fine drawings may be seen in the British Museum; but the Le Nain signature is rare, and is never accompanied by initials which might enable us to distinguish the work of the brothers. Their lives are lost in obscurity; all that can be affirmed is that they were born at Laon in Picardy towards the close of the 16th century. About 1629 they went to Paris; in 1648 the three brothers were received into the Academy, and in the same year both Antoine and Louis died. Mathieu lived on till August 1677; he bore the title of chevalier, and painted many portraits. Mary of Medici and Mazarin were amongst his sitters, but these works seem to have disappeared.
See Champfleury, Essai sur la vie et l’œuvre des Le Nain (1850), and Catalogue des tableaux des Le Nain (1861).