Within a few days of her death died her husband and her lover. Roland, on hearing of her execution, in his hiding-place near Rouen, thrust his cane-sword into his breast; Buzot, wandering and starving in the fields, was found half-eaten by wolves. She had confided her daughter Eudora and her "Memoirs" to the loyal friend Bosc, who hid the manuscript in the forest of Montmorenci, and in 1795 published it for the daughter's benefit. The original is said to be in existence, on coarse gray paper, stained with her tears. Sainte-Beuve speaks of them as "delicious and indispensable memories," deserving a place "beside the most sublime and eloquent effusions of a brave yet tender philosophy." When he praises that style, clearer and more concise than that of Madame de Staël, "that other daughter of Rousseau," he does not say all; he might have added that, like Rousseau, she occasionally speaks of matters not quite convenient to hear.
It is difficult to refrain from undue admiration and pity, to remain temperate and modest, when one dwells on the character and qualities, the blameless life and the ignominious death, of Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet. We may look up at his thoughtful face in bronze on Quai Conti, alongside the Mint, where he lived in the entresol of the just completed building, when appointed Director of the Hôtel de la Monnaie by his old friend Turgot, in 1774. We may look upon the house in Rue Servandoni where he hid, and from which he escaped to his death. His other Paris homes have no existence now. His college of Navarre—oldest of all those in the University—has been made over into the École Polytechnique; and the house he built for himself in Rue Chantereine, which was afterward owned by Josephine Beauharnais, has long since disappeared. When only twenty-two years of age he wrote his famous essay on the Integral Calculus, when twenty-six he was elected to the Academy of Sciences. Made Perpetual Secretary of that body in 1777, it came in the course of his duties to deliver eulogies on Pascal, d'Alembert, Buffon, and Franklin, and others of the great guild of science. These are more than perfunctory official utterances, they are of an eloquence that shows his lovable character as well as his scientific authority. He contributed largely to Diderot's Encyclopædia, and put forth many astronomical, mathematical, and theological treatises during his busy life. He wrote earnestly in favor of the independence of the American colonies, and was one of the earliest advocates of the people's cause in France. But he was much more than a man of science and of letters; he was a man with a great soul, "the Seneca of the modern school," says Lamartine; the most kindly and tolerant friend of humanity, and protector of its rights, since Socrates. He believed in the indefinite perfectibility of the human race, and he wrote his last essay, proving its progress upward, while hiding in a garret from those not yet quite perfect fellow-beings, who were howling for his head! He was beloved by Benjamin Franklin and by Thomas Paine. Members of the Convention together, he and Paine prepared the new Constitution of 1793, in which political document they found no place for theological dogma. Robespierre prevented the adoption of this Constitution, having taken God under his own protection. Condorcet made uncompromising criticism, and was put on the list of those to be suspected and got rid of. Too broad to ally himself with the Girondists, he was yet proscribed with them, on June 2, 1793. His friends had forced him to go into hiding, until he might escape. They had asked Madame Vernet—widow of the painter Claude-Joseph, mother of Carle, grandmother of Horace—to give shelter to one of the proscribed, and she had asked only if he were an honest man. This loyal woman concealed him in her garret for nearly one year, and would have kept him longer, but that he feared for her safety, and for that of his wife and daughter, who might be tracked in their visits to him by night. He had finished his "Esquisse d'un Tableau historique des Progrès de l'Esprit humain," full of hope for humanity, with no word of reproach or repining, and then he wrote his last words: "Advice of one proscribed, to his Daughter." This is to be read to-day for its lofty spirit. He gives her the names of certain good men who will befriend her, and among them is Benjamin Franklin Bache, the son of our Franklin's daughter Sally, who had been in Paris with his grandfather.
Then, this letter finished, early on the morning of April 5, 1794, he left it on his table and slipped out, unseen by the good widow Vernet, from the three-storied plaster-fronted house now No. 15 of Rue Servandoni, and still unaltered, as is almost the entire street. Through it he hurried to Rue de Vaugirard, where he stood undecided for a moment, the prison of the Luxembourg on his left, and the prison of the Carmelites on his right, both full of his friends. And on the walls, all about, were placards with big-lettered warning that death was the penalty for harboring the proscribed. Here at the corner, he ran against one Sarret, cousin of Madame Vernet, who went with him, showing the way through narrow streets to the Barrière du Maine, which was behind the present station of Mont-Parnasse. Safely out of the town, the two men took the road to Fontenay-aux-Roses, and at night Sarret turned back. Condorcet lost his way, and wandered about the fields for two days, sleeping in the quarries of Clamart, until driven by hunger into a wretched inn. Demanding an omelet, he was asked how many eggs he would have; the ignorant-learned man ordered a dozen, too many for the working-man he was personating, and suspicions were aroused. The villagers bound and dragged him to the nearest guardhouse at Bourg-la-Reine. He died in his cell that night, April 7, 1794, by poison, it is believed. For he wore a ring containing poison; the same sort of poison, it is said, that was carried by Napoleon, with which he tried—or pretended to try—to kill himself at Fontainebleau. In the modern village of Bourg-la-Reine, five and a half miles from Paris, the principal square bears the name of Condorcet, and holds his bust in marble.
"La Veuve Condorcet" appears in the Paris Bottin every year until 1822, when she died. She had been imprisoned on the identification of her husband's body, but was released after Robespierre's death. She passed the Duplay house every day during those years, going to her little shop at 232 Rue Saint-Honoré. There she had set up a linen business on the ground floor, and above, she painted portraits in a small way. She was a woman of rare beauty and of fine mind, with all womanly graces and all womanly courage. Married in 1786, and much younger than her husband, timorous before his real age and his seeming austerity, she had grown up to him, and had learned to love that "volcano covered with snow," as his friend d'Alembert had said he was. She had a pretty gift with her pen, and her translation into French of Adam Smith's "Theory of Moral Sentiments" is still extant. Her little salon came to be greatly frequented in her beautiful old age.
Condorcet's famous fellow-worker in science, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, was guillotined in May, 1794, the two men having the same number of years, fifty-one. He was condemned, not for being a chemist, albeit his enlightened judges were of the opinion that "the Republic has no need of chemists," but because he had filled, with justice and honesty, his office of Farmer-General under royalty. Their contemporaries of nearly equal age, Gaspard Monge and Claude-Louis Berthollet, escaped the guillotine, and were among the savants in the train of General Bonaparte in his Italian and Egyptian campaigns. After many years of useful labors, they died peacefully under the Restoration.
Pierre-Simon Laplace, of almost equal years with these four, lived to a greater age, and received higher honors from the Emperor and the Bourbons. Coming from his birth-place in Calvados in 1767, his first Paris home to be found is in Rue des Noyers; one side of which ancient street now forms that southern section of Boulevard Saint-Germain opposite Rue des Anglais, its battered houses seeming to shrink back from the publicity thrust upon them. In that one now numbered 57 in the boulevard, formerly No. 33 Rue des Noyers, Alfred de Musset was born in 1810; and in the same row lived Laplace in 1777. In 1787 we find him in Rue Mazarine, and in 1790 in Rue Louis-le-Grand, and this latter residence represents his only desertion of the University side of the Seine. He returned to that bank when placed by the Consuls in the Senate, and made his home in 1801 at No. 24 Rue des Grands-Augustins, and in the following year at No. 2 Rue Christine. These stately mansions of that period, only a step apart, remain as he left them. When Laplace was made Chancellor of the Senate, in 1805, his official residence was in the Luxembourg, and there it continued until 1815, the year of the Restoration. His private residence, from 1805 to 1809, was at No. 6 Rue de Tournon, a house still standing in all its senatorial respectability. He gave this up, and again took up his quarters in the Luxembourg, when made a Count of the Empire and Vice-President of the Senate.
From the Medician palace, which appears in the Bottin of those years as simple No. 19 Rue de Vaugirard, Laplace removed to No. 51 of that street, when the returned Bourbons made him a Peer of France. This house, near Rue d'Assas—named for the Chevalier Nicolas d'Assas, the heroic captain of the regiment of Auvergne during the Seven Years' War—is unaltered since his time. His last change of abode was made in 1818, to Rue du Bac, 100, where he died in 1827. It is a mansion of old-fashioned dignity, with a large court in front and a larger garden behind, and is now numbered 108. The growing importance of his successive dwellings, every one of which may be visited to-day, mark his growth in importance as a man of state. The growth of the man of science is represented by his colossal "La Mécanique Céleste," which first appeared in 1799, and was continued by successive volumes until its completion in 1825. Its title, rather than his titles, should be inscribed on his monument.
A little later than these famous confrères, Georges Cuvier appears in Paris—in Hugo's half-truth—"with one eye on the book of Genesis and the other on nature, endeavoring to please bigoted reaction by reconciling fossils with texts, and making the mastodons support Moses." His first home, at the present 40 Rue de Seine, is a fine old-fashioned mansion. He removed to the opposite side of that street in 1810, and there remained until 1816, his house being now replaced by the new and characterless structure at No. 35. Full of character, however, is his official residence as Professor in the Jardin des Plantes, which took again its ancient title of Jardin du Roi during the Restoration. "La Maison de Cuvier" is a charming old building near the garden-entrance in Rue Cuvier, and within is the bust of this most gifted teacher of his time. His genuine devotion to science and his tolerance for all policies carried him through the several changes of government during his life. He completed the Napoleonic conquest of Italy and Holland by his introduction of the French methods of education, perfected by him. The Bourbons made him Baron and Chancellor of the University, and the Orleans king elevated him to the Peerage of France. He died in 1832.
Paul-François-Jean-Nicolas, Comte de Barras—soldier, adventurer, a power in the Convention, the power of the Directory, practically dictator for a while—has added to the hilarity of the sceptical student of history by his "Memoirs," kept concealed since his death, in 1829, until their publication within a few years. Splendidly mendacious in these pages as he was in life, Barras posed always as the man on horseback of his "13 Vendémiaire." On that day, unwittingly yet actually, he put into the saddle—where he stayed—his young friend Buonaparte, whose qualities he had discovered at the siege of Toulon. This artillery officer, while planting his batteries to cover every approach to the Tuileries, where cowered the frightened Convention, took personal command of the guns that faced Saint-Roch. The front of that church still shows the scars of the bullets that stopped the rush of the Sections in that direction. This battery was placed at the Rue Saint-Honoré end of the narrow lane leading from that street to the gardens of the Tuileries—there being then no Rue de Rivoli, you will bear in mind. This lane was known as Rue du Dauphin, because of the royal son who had used it, going between the Tuileries and the church; after that day, it was popularly called Rue du 13-Vendémiaire, until it received its official appellation of Rue Saint-Roch, when widened and aligned in 1807. At this time there were only two houses in the street, near its southern end, and one of them was a hôtel-garni, in which young Buonaparte caught a short sleep on that night of October 5, 1795. The oldest structure in Rue Saint-Roch to-day is that with the two numbers 4 and 6, and it is known to have been already a hôtel-garni in the first years of the nineteenth century, when it was refaced. So that it is well within belief that we have found here Buonaparte's head-quarters for that one night.
Let us now, crossing the river, get on the ground of positive proof, safe from doubts or conjectures. The Duchesse d'Abrantès, wife of that adorable ruffian, Andoche Junot, made a duke in 1807 by the Emperor, writes in her "Memoirs": "To this day, whenever I pass along Quai Conti, I cannot help looking up at the garret windows at the left angle of the house, on the third floor. That was Napoleon's chamber, when he paid us a visit; and a neat little room it was. My brother used to occupy the one next it." Madame Junot had been Mlle. Laure Permon, whose father, an army contractor, had brought his family to Paris early in 1785, and leased for his residence the Hôtel Sillery, formerly the Petit Hôtel Guénégaud. Madame Permon, a Corsican lady, had been an early friend of Madame Buonaparte, and had rocked young Buonaparte in his cradle; so that he was called by his first name in her family, as her daughter shows in this quotation. Finding him at the École Royale Militaire in Paris, she invited him to her house for frequent visits, once for a week's stay, whenever permission could be got from the school authorities. He was a lank, cadaverous, dishevelled lad, solitary, taciturn, and morose; brooding over the poverty that had forced him to seek an unpaid-for scholarship, and not readily making friends with the more fortunate Albert Permon. Yet he came often, and was nowhere so content as in this house before us. It stands far back from the front of the quay, half-hidden between the Institute and the Mint, and is numbered 13 Quai Conti, and its entrance is on the side at No. 2 Impasse Conti. Its upper portion is now occupied by a club of American art students. Constructed by Mansart, its rooms are of admirable loftiness and proportion, and retain much of their sixteenth-century decoration. Here in this salon after dinner, young Buonaparte would storm about the "indecent luxury" of his schoolmates, or sit listening to Madame Permon, soothed by her reminiscent prattle about Corsica and his mother, to whom he always referred as Madame Letitia. Here he first showed himself to the daughters in his new sub-lieutenant's uniform, before joining his regiment on October 30, 1785, and they laughed at his thin legs in their big boots.