The Revolution guillotined Lavoisier and seized his notebooks, and his widow fought until she got back the property and nearly all his papers

Antoine Lavoisier was a chemist and a tax farmer^†. He was jailed from 28 November 1793. On 8 May 1794 he and his father-in-law, Jacques Paulze, were tried, convicted and guillotined. His widow, Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier, was jailed and later freed. The government confiscated her money and property and seized her husband's notebooks and laboratory equipment. She fought for her husband's reputation and his materials, and her property was eventually returned. Before her death she recovered nearly all of his notebooks and apparatus. She married Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, in 1804. They separated three years later, and she kept the name Lavoisier all her life. She died suddenly at her home in Paris on 10 February 1836 and is buried at Père Lachaise. The collection she assembled after the execution stayed in private hands. Cornell University bought the first part in 1962 with funds from Mr and Mrs Nicholas H. Noyes and Mr and Mrs Spencer T. Olin. In 2007 it bought the last remaining part of her collection: about 2,000 books and manuscripts, hundreds more pages of manuscripts, and over 150 printed items. Cornell's Lavoisier Collection holds nearly 2,000 volumes, about 600 of them from the couple's own library, and 31 linear feet of manuscripts and graphics, the largest on Lavoisier outside France.