Marie Paradis

[7] The second woman to climb Mont Blanc did so thirty years after her; when Henriette d'Angeville celebrated her successful ascent in Chamonix, she was congratulated by Paradis who had received her special, personal invitation.

Dumas wrote a fairly long passage about Paradis in Impressions de Voyage: Suisse, which chronicled his travels through the Chamonix valley in 1832.

Moreover, he curiously reports the date of Paradis's ascent as having occurred in 1811, despite the fact that the person who recounted the details to him was in Marie’s climbing party.

In an essay published in the 1826 edition of The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, climbers Dr. Edmund John Clark and Captain Markham Sherwill present a slightly different perspective in one of their footnotes.

“On arriving at the Petit Mulet,” it states, “she was excessively exhausted, and almost fainting with fatigue; yet her resolution was not shaken, and, with a little assistance from her companions, she mounted safely to the summit of Mont Blanc, and redescended unhurt to the valley.