For many months the woman who loved him had no news of his death. She hoped against hope that he had escaped, and was in safety in Switzerland. To support her little household she took a fine-linen shop in the Rue St. Honoré, and in the entresol set up her little studio where she continued her portrait-painting.
In January, 1794, for the good and safety of their child, she had heroically petitioned the municipality for a divorce from her husband, and obtained it—six weeks after his death. When the certain news of that death reached her, both her health and her strong heart faltered. But Doctor Cabanis, who afterwards married her young sister, saved her—for further effort and longer work.
Full of courage and resignation she rose up again, wrote a preface to ‘The Progress of the Human Mind,’ educated her child, and when in 1795 some of her fortune was restored, immediately began paying the pensions which d’Alembert had asked Condorcet to give his old servants.
In later days she had a little salon in Paris, saw her daughter happily married, and died in 1822. In every stupendous change which France experienced between the fall of Robespierre and the death of Napoleon Bonaparte, she remained faithful to the principles to which her husband had devoted his genius and his life.
Through all, the Marquise de Condorcet had been, and had counted herself, a happy woman. Wrung with such sorrows as do not fall to the lot of many of her sex, she had had a blessing which is the portion of far fewer of them; she had inspired a great devotion, and had been worthy of it.
To Condorcet is meted now in some sort the same judgment as was meted to him in life.
Since he never gave himself blindly to any one faction, all factions have distrusted and condemned him. To the Royalist he is a Revolutionist; to the Revolutionist he is an aristocrat. The thinker cannot forgive him that his thought led him to deeds and words; the man of action cannot forget that he was thinker and dreamer to the end. While the Church can never pardon his persistent hostility to theology, his vehement opposition to Roman Catholicism, as the religion ‘where a few rogues make many dupes,’ the unbeliever is impatient with his serene faith in human kind, his unshattered trust in the goodness, not of God, but of man.
Far in advance of his time—in some respects of our time too—in his views on the rights of men and of women, on the education of children, and in his steady abhorrence of all limitation of what Voltaire called ‘the noble liberty of thinking,’ he is still condemned for an unpractical idealism, and for his passionate conviction that all errors are the fruit of bad laws.
But he at least stands out clearly to any impartial observer as one of the very few whose lofty disinterestedness came unscorched through the fire of the Terror.
In private life, stern to duty and yet tenderer than any woman in his quiet, deep affections, patient and strong with the fine endurance of steel and with the capacity (that capacity which is as rare as genius) for the highest form of human love, he showed a great character beside which even his great intellect seems a small thing and a mean.