O'Connor, after having for sixteen years occupied apartments in the house of an eminent bookseller and printer, Monsieur Renouard, in the Rue de Tournan, leading to the Luxembourg, and the only street that I remember, now sixty years since, had a flagged footpath in that, at present, embellished metropolis, purchased his late residence, the Château de Bignon, with the proceeds of his paternal estates sold here, as previously stated, in 1834. The purchase was made from the heirs of Mirabeau, who was born in that mansion, and not in Provence, as generally supposed, because that southern province was the family's original seat. The great orator's father, distinguished, per antiphrasim, as "l'Ami des hommes," for he was the most unamiable of men, had acquired and removed to the castle so called, in order to approach the royal court of Versailles. The renowned son's bursts of eloquence still, I may say, resound in my ears, dazzling and entrancing my judgment, as Lord Chatham is reported similarly to have affected his hearers. Yet my old friend Vergniaux's genuine oratory and reasoning power struck me as far superior; and I can well believe that Chatham's son's were to those of his father, which his contemporary, Hume, no incompetent judge, and doubtless his
hearer, by no means exalts, though the effects on his parliamentary audience appear to have been so extraordinary. "At present," writes Hume (Essay xiii.), "there are above half-a-dozen speakers in the two houses, who, in the judgment of the public, have reached very nearly the same pitch of eloquence, and no man pretends to give any one a preference over the next. This seems to me a certain proof that none of them have attained much beyond mediocrity in this art." Hume's Essays first appeared in 1742, when the elder Pitt was, indeed, young in parliament; but he survived till 1776, during which interval Chatham's fame reached its culminating point. Yet, in all the ensuing editions, the author never thought it necessary to modify his depreciation of British eloquence.
O'Connor, it is said, published his father-in-law Condorcet's collective works; but whether the edition of 1804 in 21 volumes is meant, I cannot determine, though I know no other; nor does this contain his mathematical writings. While outlawed in 1793 with the Girondist faction, he evaded, from October to March, 1794, the revolutionary search, when he poisoned himself, unwilling, he said, in some verses addressed to his wife, the sister of Marshal Grouchy, further to participate in the horrors of the period, though he had been most instrumental in preparing the way for them. He chose, however, the better side, in his conception, of the proposed alternative or dilemma:
"Ils m'ont dit: Choisis d'être oppresseur ou victime;
J'embrassai le malheur, et leur laissai le crime."
Madame O'Connor, a child of five years old at her father's death, had a very faint recollection of him; but I perfectly remember him, with his ardent look, and, while still young, a grey head,—"a volcano covered with snow," as was observed of him. O'Connor's only child, a mild gentlemanly young man, but certainly not the inheritor of his parent's talents, predeceased him, so that no descendant, either of Condorcet or O'Connor, now survives.
J. R. (of Cork).
Footnote 1:[(return)]
Indeed, the general history of the kingdom is still a sad desideratum, and, in the impassioned dissensions of the people, not likely to be adequately supplied.