BECKX, PIERRE JEAN (1795-1887), general of the Society of Jesus, was born at Sichem in Belgium on the 8th of February 1795, and entered the novitiate of the order at Hildesheim in 1819. His first important post was as procurator for the province of Austria, 1847; next year he became rector of the Jesuit college at Louvain, and, after serving as secretary to the provincials of Belgium and Austria, was elected head of the order in 1853. His tenure of office was marked by an increased zeal for missions in Protestant lands, and by the removal of the society’s headquarters from Rome to Fiesole near Florence in 1870. His chief literary work was the often-translated Month of Mary (Vienna, 1843). He retired in September 1883, being succeeded by Anthony M. Anderledy, a Swiss, who had seen service in the United States. He died at Rome on the 4th of March 1887.
BECQUE, HENRY FRANÇOIS (1837-1899), French dramatist, was born on the 9th of April 1837 in Paris. He wrote the book of an opera Sardanapale in imitation of Lord Byron for the music of M. Victorin Joncières in 1867, but his first important work, Michel Pauper, appeared in 1870. The importance of this sombre drama was first realized when it was revived at the Odéon in 1886. Les Corbeaux (1882) established Becque’s position as an innovator, and in 1885 he produced his most successful play, La Parisienne. Becque produced little during the last years of his life, but his disciples carried on the tradition he had created. He died in May 1899.
See his Querelles littéraires (1890), and Souvenirs d’un auteur dramatique (1895), consisting chiefly of reprinted articles in which he does not spare his opponents. His Théâtre complet (3 vols., 1899) includes L’Enfant prodigue (Vaudeville Theatre, 6th of Nov. 1868); Michel Pauper (Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin, 17th of June 1870); L’Enlèvement (Vaudeville, 18th of Nov. 1871); La Navette (Gymnase, 15th of Nov. 1878); Les Honnêtes Femmes (Gymnase, 1st of Jan. 1880); Les Corbeaux (Comédie Française, 14th of Sept. 1882); La Parisienne (Théâtre de la Renaissance, 7th of Feb. 1885).
BÉCQUER, GUSTAVO ADOLFO (1836-1870), Spanish poet and romance-writer, was born at Seville on the 17th of February 1836. Left an orphan at an early age, he was educated by his godmother, refused to adopt any profession, and drifted to Madrid, where he obtained a small post in the civil service. He was dismissed for carelessness, became an incorrigible Bohemian, and earned a precarious living by translating foreign novels; he died in great poverty at Madrid on the 22nd of December 1870. His works were published posthumously in 1873. In such prose tales as El Rayo de Luna and La Mujer de piedra, Bécquer is manifestly influenced by Hoffmann, and as a poet he has analogies with Heine. He dwells in a fairyland of his own, crooning a weird elfin music which has no parallel in Spanish; his work is unfinished and unequal, but it is singularly free from the rhetoric characteristic of his native Andalusia, and its lyrical ardour is of a beautiful sweetness and sincerity.
BECQUEREL, the name of a French family, several members of which have been distinguished in chemical and physical research.
Antoine César Becquerel (1788-1878), was born at Châtillon sur Loing on the 8th of March 1788. After passing through the École Polytechnique he became ingénieur-officier in 1808, and saw active service with the imperial troops in Spain from 1810 to 1812, and again in France in 1814. He then resigned from the army and devoted the rest of his life to scientific investigation. His earliest work was mineralogical in character, but he soon turned his attention to the study of electricity and especially of electrochemistry. In 1837 he received the Copley medal from the Royal Society “for his various memoirs on electricity, and particularly for those on the production of metallic sulphurets and sulphur by the long-continued action of electricity of very low tension,” which it was hoped would lead to increased knowledge of the “recomposition of crystallized bodies, and the processes which may have been employed by nature in the production of such bodies in the mineral kingdom.” In biological chemistry he worked at the problems of animal heat and at the phenomena accompanying the growth of plants, and he also devoted much time to meteorological questions and observations. He was a prolific writer, his books including Traité d’électricité et du magnétisme (1834-1840), Traité de physique dans ses rapports avec la chimie (1842), Éléments de l’électro-chimie (1843), Traité complet du magnétisme (1845), Éléments de physique terrestre et de météorologie (1847), and Des climats et de l’influence qu’exercent les sols boisés et déboisés (1853). He died on the 18th of January 1878 in Paris, where from 1837 he had been professor of physics at the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle.
His son, Alexandre Edmond Becquerel (1820-1891), was born in Paris on the 24th of March 1820, and was in turn his pupil, assistant and successor at the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle; he was also appointed professor at the short-lived Agronomic Institute at Versailles in 1849, and in 1853 received the chair of physics at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. Edmond Becquerel was associated with his father in much of his work, but he himself paid special attention to the study of light, investigating the photochemical effects and spectroscopic characters of solar radiation and the electric light, and the phenomena of phosphorescence, particularly as displayed by the sulphides and by compounds of uranium. It was in connexion with these latter inquiries that he devised his phosphoroscope, an apparatus which enabled the interval between exposure to the source of light and observation of the resulting effects to be varied at will and accurately measured. He published in 1867-1868 a treatise in two volumes on La Lumière, ses causes et ses effets. He also investigated the diamagnetic and paramagnetic properties of substances; and was keenly interested in the phenomena of electrochemical decomposition, accumulating much evidence in favour of Faraday’s law and proposing a modified statement of it which was intended to cover certain apparent exceptions. He died in Paris on the 11th of May 1891.