Marguerite Teilhard-Chambon (1880–1959)

Marguerite Teillard-Chambon was born in an old Renaissance hôtel in Clermont-Ferrand to a distinguished Auvergne family, the eldest daughter of six children. Her parents were Cirice Teillard-Chambon, an engineer, and his wife Marie Déchelette. She became a close friend of her cousin, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who shared her childhood.
In 1900, at the age of 20, Marguerite went to Paris to study. She passed the competitive exams for the Agrégation de Lettres in 1904 and quickly found a job at the Institut Notre Dame des Champs, where she taught for more than 15 years. At the start of the 1920s, she left the school and went on an extended trip to Italy, where she wrote La Loi du faible (The Law of the Weak, 1925), published under the pseudonym of Claude Aragonnès (the name of one of her 17th-century ancestors), for which she won the Montyon Prize. She also wrote award-winning biographies of Madeleine de Scudéry; Françoise d'Aubigné, marquise de Maintenon; and Marie d'Agoult. After joining her cousin Pierre on a trip to the USA, she returned to the Institut Notre Dame des Champs to teach literature. For her students, she published Les romanciers du XIXe siècle (1933) and Les authors français par la dissertation (1950). In 1947, she wrote a play for the students of l'École normale catholique, Esther à Saint-Cyr. She actively participated in the movements to promote women's suffrage and higher education in the 1930s, giving lectures and writing articles.
An admirer of Abraham Lincoln, she did extensive research and traveled through Virginia, Kentucky and Illinois for the preparation of her 1955 book Lincoln, héros d'un peuple (Lincoln, Hero of a People), which won the Thérouanne prize for history writing of the Académie française. She also edited, wrote introductions for, and arranged publication of three volumes of correspondence with her late cousin Pierre, the last appearing after her own death.