ABSTRACT
Late eighteenth-century thinking on marriage and on the scientific vocation crisscrossed in many ways, some of which demonstrate the intimate dependence of scientific ideologies on the field of concepts surrounding them. Powerful currents of thought in this period rejected the world (le monde) and vaunted the simple, the natural, and the good as a means to the making of authentic, uncorrupted human beings. For others, the inescapable companion of marriage, however neutralized by Rousseauist idealization, was le monde: the world of social connection and social leverage, as romantic ideas of marriage as companionship gained ground, of lifelong negotiation with another human being, with all of its implied threat to the blessed objectivity of the man of science. Historians of ancien régime elites have frequently remarked on their tendency not to intermarry, despite financial interests in common or common membership of institutions.
