Biography
Born from a noble family of the province of Soule, his father Michel was born in Arrast-Larrebieu and his mother was Irish. His grandfather Jean-Pierre was an abbot and a notary in Soule.
The family moved to France in 1818 where the brothers received a careful scientific education.
At his return from Ethiopia, he married Virginie Vincent de Saint Bonnet in 1848, and settled in Hendaye where he purchased 250ha to build a castle, and became the mayor of the city from 1871 to 1875.
Abbadie was a knight of the Legion of Honour and a member of the French Academy of Sciences. He died in 1897, and bequeathed the Abbadi domain and castle in Hendaye, yielding 40,000 francs a year, to the Academy of Sciences.
Read more about this topic: Antoine Thomson D'Abbadie
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)