The end of all was very sad. For some weeks before his death he was nearly destitute of the means of subsistence. His noble and royal friends had entirely deserted him. Executions for debt were in his house, and he passed his last days in the custody of sheriffs' officers, who abstained from conveying him to prison merely because they were assured that to remove him would cause his immediate death.[2]
[Footnote 2: Memoirs of the Life of Sir S. Romilly, vol. iii., p. 262.]
The Cardinal de Retz sold off everything to pay his debts, but he did not recover his liberty. He described the perpetual anguish of the debtor. He even preferred confinement in the Castle of Vincennes, to being exposed to the annoyances of his creditors. Mirabeau's life was one of perpetual debt; for he was a dreadful spendthrift. The only mode by which his father could keep him out of scrapes, was by obtaining a lettre de cachet, and having him-safely imprisoned. Though Mirabeau wielded the powers of the State, when he died he was so poor, or had been so extravagant, that he was still indebted to the tailor for his wedding suit.
Lamartine ran through half-a-dozen fortunes, and at the end of his life was "sending round the hat." Lamartine boldly proclaimed that he hated arithmetic, "that negative of every noble thought." He was accordingly driven to very shabby shifts to live. The Cours de Litterature alone brought him in 200,000 francs a year, yet 'the money ran through his hands like quicksilver. His debts are said to have amounted to three millions of francs; yet his style of living remained unchanged. One of his enthusiastic admirers, having stinted himself in subscribing towards the repurchase of the Lamartine estates, went into a fishmonger's one day to purchase a piece of turbot. It was too dear for his means. A distinguished-looking personage entered, paused for a moment before the turbot, and without questioning the price, ordered the fish to be sent to his house. It was M. de Lamartine.
Webster, the American statesman, was afflicted with impecuniosity, arising from his carelessness about money matters, as well as from his extravagance. If we are to believe Theodore Parker, Webster, like Bacon, took bribes. "He contracted debts and did not settle, borrowed and yielded not again. Private money sometimes clove to his hands…. A senator of the United States, he was pensioned by the manufacturers of Boston. His later speeches smell of bribes." Monroe and Jefferson were always in want of money, and often in debt; though they were both honest men.
The life which public men lead nowadays, is often an incentive to excessive expenditure. They may be men of moderate means; they may even be poor; but not many of them moving in general society have the moral courage to seem to be so. To maintain their social position, they think it necessary to live as others do. They are thus drawn into the vortex of debt, and into all the troubles, annoyances, shabby shifts, and dishonesties, which debt involves.
Men of science are for the most part exempt from the necessity of shining in society; and hence they furnish but a small number of instances of illustrious debtors. Many of them have been poor, but they have usually lived within their means. Kepler's life was indeed a struggle with poverty and debt; arising principally from the circumstance of his salary, as principal mathematician to the Emperor of Germany, having been always in arrear. This drove him to casting nativities in order to earn a living. "I pass my time," he once wrote, "in begging at the doors of crown treasurers." At his death he left only twenty-two crowns, the dress he wore, two shirts, a few books, and many manuscripts. Leibnitz left behind him a large amount of debt; but this may have been caused by the fact that he was a politician as well as a philosopher, and had frequent occasion to visit foreign courts, and to mix on equal terms with the society of the great.
Spinoza was poor in means; yet inasmuch as what he earned by polishing glasses for the opticians was enough to supply his wants, he incurred no debts. He refused a professorship, and refused a pension, preferring to live and die independent. Dalton had a philosophical disregard for money. When his fellow-townsmen at Manchester once proposed to provide him with an independence, that he might devote the rest of his life to scientific investigation, he declined the offer, saying that "teaching was a kind of recreation to him, and that if richer he would probably not spend more time in his investigations than he was accustomed to do." Faraday's was another instance of moderate means and noble independence. Lagrange was accustomed to attribute his fame and happiness to the poverty of his father, the astronomer royal of Turin. "Had I been rich," he said, "probably I should not have become a mathematician."
The greatest debtor connected with science was John Hunter, who expended all his available means—and they were wholly earned by himself—in accumulating the splendid collection now known as the Hunterian Museum. All that he could collect in fees went to purchase new objects for preparation and dissection, or upon carpenters' and bricklayers' work for the erection of his gallery. Though his family were left in straitened circumstances at his death, the sale of the collection to the nation for £15,000 enabled all his debts to be paid, and at the same time left an enduring monument to his fame.
Great artists have nearly all struggled into celebrity through poverty, and some have never entirely emerged from it. This, however, has been mainly because of their improvidence. Jan Steen was always in distress, arising principally from the habit he had acquired of drinking his own beer; for he was first a brewer, and afterwards a tavern-keeper. He drank and painted alternately, sometimes transferring the drinking scenes of which he had been a witness to the canvas, even while himself in a state of intoxication. He died in debt, after which his pictures rose in value, until now they are worth their weight in gold.