I believe I have mentioned somewhere that Taylor succeeded Chéron.
At the beginning of the year, on 15 February, Comte Marie de Chamans de Lavalette had also died; he it was who, in 1815, was saved by the devotion of his wife and of two Englishmen; one of whom, Sir Robert Wilson, I met in 1846 when he was Governor of Gibraltar. Comte de Lavalette lived fifteen years after his condemnation to death; caring for his wife, in his turn, for she had gone insane from the terrible anxiety she suffered in helping her husband to escape.
On 11 March the obituary list was marked by the death of the Marquis de Lally-Tollendal, whom I knew well: he was the son of the Lally-Tollendal who was executed in the place de Grève as guilty of peculation, upon whom it will be recollected Gilbert wrote lines that were certainly some of his best. The poor Marquis de Lally-Tollendal was always in trouble, but this did not prevent him from becoming enormously stout. He weighed nearly three hundred pounds; Madame de Staël called him "the fattest of sentient beings."
Perhaps I have already said this somewhere. If so, I ask pardon for repeating it.
The same month Radet died, the doyen of vaudevillists. During the latter years of his life he was afflicted with kleptomania, but his friends never minded; if, after his departure they missed anything they knew where to go and look for the missing article.
Then, on 15 April, Hippolyte Bendo died. He was behindhand, for death, who was out of breath with running after him, caught him up at the age of one hundred and twenty-two. He had married again at one hundred and one!
Then, on 23 April, died the Chevalier Sue, father of Eugène Sue; he had been honorary physician in chief to the household of King Charles X. He was a man of great originality of mind and, at times, of singular artlessness of expression; those who heard him give his course of lectures on conchology will bear me out in this I am very sure.
On 29 May that excellent man Jérôme Gohier passed away, of whom I have spoken as an old friend of mine; and who could not forgive Bonaparte for causing the events of 18 Brumaire, whilst he, Gohier, was breakfasting with Josephine.