Regine Reynolds-Cornell, née Régine Pierette Alexandrine Gardivaud, was born in Paris on the 2nd of July 1929, and grew up during the occupation and the second world war, under the kind care of her pharmacist father Achille Gardivaud and her mother Pierette Miré. After her father's passing in the early fifties, she traveled to New York City to fulfill her civil service duty with a French bank, and was soon thereafter engaged as an interpreter and transcriber on the floor of the security council of the United Nations. She was subsequently assigned to diplomatic missions in east Africa and lived in Mogadishu, when it was still a paradise. There she met Bennie Reynolds, a pipeline engineer from central Texas, to whom she would soon marry in Nairobi and thereafter have two sons, Dennis Wade and Eric Lee. His career took them through Italy, Malta, Chile, and Spain in the sixties, but their marriage ended in 1970, by which time she had attained her undergraduate and master's degrees from the University of Texas at Austin. She was then hired by Southwestern University in Georgetown, where she was head of the Foreign Language Department while she completed and was awarded her doctorate from U.T. in renaissance history. During her tenure at S.U. she was revered and beloved for her caring and understanding nature, and was known by all on campus to have an open door and heart to anyone in need of confidence.
In the early eighties she met John B. Cornell, a modern cultural anthropologist at the University of Texas. They married not long before she accepted a position at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, where they moved in the mid eighties and lived very happily together during her tenure there as a very caring and respected professor in the foreign language department, until his unfortunate passing in 1994. Tragically, after having moved to Decatur in 1990, her son Dennis passed away in 1998. Despite her grief and losses, Régine gracefully carried on in her pursuit of renaissance studies and the arts. Upon retiring from teaching, renowned worldwide for her studies and publications in French renaissance history, and her vast research and knowledge of Margeurite de Navarre, she published a novel about la Reine de Navarre which was entirely based upon historical fact but recounted by a fictional lady in waiting, ''In the Shadow of a Queen''.
Madame Reynolds-Cornell carried on to be on the board of the Alliance Française of Atlanta and a docent at the High Museum for many years, and was an enthusiastic patron of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
Her ultimate recognition was to be awarded The Order of Academic Palms (Ordre des Palmes Académiques) by the French Ministry of Culture, a national order bestowed by the French Republic upon distinguished academics and figures in the world of culture and education.
Madame Régine passed away from natural causes at the age of 92 on the 8th of February 2022... après une vie exemplaire et remarquable.
A service will be held in her honor at the chapel on the campus of Agnes Scott College on June 11 at 2:00 pm.