Anne-Catherine de Ligniville, Madame Helvétius Madame Helvétius is mentioned briefly in the Robert Lawson children's book "Ben and Me" (1939) as having many important people at her dinners, and also having cats (distressing to the protagonist, who is a mouse) and a particularly disagreeable dog. Anne-Catherine de Ligniville, Madame Helvétius Anne-Catherine de Ligniville, Madame Helvétius (23 July 1722 – 12 August 1800), also Anne-Catherine de Ligniville d'Autricourt, nicknamed "Minette", maintained a renowned salon in France in the eighteenth century. One of the twenty-one children of Jean-Jacques de Ligniville and his wife Charlotte de Saureau, Anne-Catherine de Ligniville, the niece of Madame de Graffigny, married the
Anne Jane Thornton Anne Jane Thornton Anne Jane Thornton (1817–1877), also spelt Ann Jane Thornton, was a 19th-century adventurer from Donegal who in 1832 posed as a boy to go to sea, in pursuit of a lost lover who had gone to the United States. She continued her career as a seaman until her arrival in London in 1835, when she was interviewed by the Lord Mayor of London. She later wrote a book about her adventures. Born in Gloucestershire, in the west of England, in 1817, Thornton was the daughter of a prosperous shop-keeper. According to the "Oxford Dictionary of National Biography",