Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle has immortalized him, "La Marseillaise", was composed at Strasbourg, where Rouget de Lisle was garrisoned in April 1792. France had just declared war on Austria, and the mayor of Strasbourg, baron Philippe-Frédéric de Dietrich, held a dinner for the officers of the garrison, at which he lamented that France had no national anthem. Rouget de Lisle returned to his quarters and wrote the words in a fit of patriotic excitement. The piece was at first called "Chant de guerre pour l'armée du Rhin" ("War Song for the Army of the Rhine") and only received its name of "Marseillaise" from its
Emile Armet de Lisle de Lisle focused his studies on chemistry, and eventually he returned to work under his father in the family quinine business. For some time, Armet de Lisle worked as a consultant for Marie and Pierre Curie. The Curies had developed a method for extracting radium compounds from pitchblende (a radioactive ore), but the outlook of the procedure, called "fractional crystallization," was poor. Even with an abundance of pitchblende, only very minute amounts of usable radium could realistically be harvested through the tedious procedure. In 1904, de Lisle, realizing that such a process would likely benefit considerably from an industrial scale-up