Let us add the jeunesse dorée of Fréron, and we come to the 22d of August—the day when the new constitution, that of the year III., after having been debated article by article, was adopted by the Convention. The gold louis was then worth twelve hundred francs in assignats.
It was during this latter period that André-Chénier, the brother of Marie-Joseph Chénier, was beheaded. His execution took place on the 25th of July, 1794, at eight o'clock in the morning; that is to say, on the 7th Thermidor, two days before the death of Robespierre. His companions in the cart were MM. de Montalembert, De Créquy, De Montmorency, De Loiserolles—that sublime old man who took his son's place and cheerfully died in his stead—and finally Roucher, the author of "The Months," who did not know that he was to die with André Chénier until he saw him in the cart, when he uttered an exclamation of joy, and, seating himself near him, recited those beautiful lines of Racine:
Now fortune doth assume a newer trend,
Since thee again I find, thou faithful friend;
Her wrath already hath unbent,
And thus our lot in common blent.
A friend, who dared to risk his life by following the cart in order to prolong the final farewell, heard the two poets speaking of poetry, love and the future. On the way André Chénier recited his last verses to his friend, which he was in the act of writing when he was summoned by the executioner. He had them with him written in pencil; and after having read them to Roucher, he gave them to the third friend, who did not leave him until they had reached the scaffold. They were thus preserved; and Latouche, to whom we owe the only edition we have of André Chénier's poems, was enabled to include them in the volume we all know by heart:
As a last soft breeze, a tender ray,
Gleams at the close of a lovely day,
So doth my lyre at the scaffold sound its lay;
Perhaps e'en now the forfeit I must pay!
And e'er the hour its appointed round
With fleeting resonance hath wound,
Tipping the sixty steps of its allotted time,
Unending sleep will close these eyes of mine.
And e'er this verse I now begin shall fade,
The messenger of Death, ill-omened harbinger of shade,
With its black escort of ill-fame
Along its darkling corridors will speed my name.
As he mounted the scaffold, André put his hand to his forehead and said with a sigh: "And yet I did have something there!"
"You are mistaken," cried the friend who was not to die; and pointing to his heart he added, "it is there."
André Chénier, for whose sake we have wandered from our subject, and whose memory has drawn these few words from us, was the first to plant the standard of a new poetry. No one before him had written verses like his. Nay, more; no one will ever write like verses after him.