Part 36

What is called the populace rarely read and did not write. To attack it and calumniate it therefore was a convenient thing, since no refutation need to be feared. I am far from supposing that the historians whose works I have quoted, ever gave way to such considerations; but I affirm, with entire certainty, that they have deceived themselves. In the sanguinary drama that has been unrolled before your eyes, the atrocities had a quite different source from the sentiments common to the barbarians that were swarming in the dregs of society and always ready to soil it with every crime; in plainer words, it is not to the unfortunate people who have neither property, nor capital, living by the work of their hands, to the proletaires, that we are to impute the deplorable incidents which marked Bailly's last moments. To put forward an opinion so remote from received opinions, is imposing on one's self the duty of proving its truth.

After his condemnation, our colleague exclaimed, says La Fayette: "I die for the sitting of the Jeu de Paume, and not for the fatal day at the Champ de Mars." I do not here intend to expound these mysterious words in the glimpses they give us by a half-light; but, whatever meaning we may attribute to them, it is evident that the sentiments and passions of the lower class have no share in them; it is a point beyond discussion.

On reentering the Conciergerie, the evening before his death, Bailly spoke of the efforts that must have been made to excite the passions of the auditors, who followed the various phases of his trial. Factitious excitement is always the produce of corruption. The working classes are without money;, they then cannot have been the corruptors or direct promoters of the distressing scenes of which Bailly complained.

The implacable enemies of the former President of the National Assembly had procured for pay some auxiliaries among the turnkeys of the Conciergerie. M. Beugnot informs us that when the venerable magistrate was consigned to the gendarmes who were to conduct him to the Tribunal, "these wretches pushed him violently, sending him from one to the other like a drunken man, calling out: Hold there, Bailly! Catch, Bailly, there! and that they laughed and shouted at the grave demeanour the philosopher maintained amidst the insults of those cannibals."

To confirm my statement that these violences (in comparison with which, in truth, those of the Champ de Mars lose their virulence,) were fomented by pay, I have more than the formal declaration of our colleague's fellow prisoner. For in fact I find that no other prisoner or convict underwent such treatment; not even the man called the Admiral, when he was taken to the Conciergerie for having attempted to assassinate Collot-d'Herbois.

Besides, it is not only on indirect considerations that my decided opinion is founded relative to the intervention of rich and influential people in those scenes of indescribable barbarity on the Champ de Mars. Merard St. Just, the intimate friend of Bailly, has alluded by his initials to a wretch who, the very day of our colleague's death, publicly boasted of having electrified the few acolytes who, together with him, insisted on the removal of the scaffold; the day after the execution, the meeting of the Jacobins reechoed with the name of another individual of the Gros Caillou, who also claimed his share of influence in the crime.

I have progressively unrolled before you the series of events in our revolution, in which Bailly took an active part; I have scrupulously searched out the smallest circumstances of the deplorable affair on the Champ de Mars; I have followed our colleague in his proscription to the Revolutionary Tribunal, and to the foot of the scaffold. We had seen him before, surrounded by esteem, by respect, and by glory, in the bosom of our principal academies. Yet the work is not complete; several essential traits are still wanting.

I will therefore claim a few more minutes of your kind attention. The moral life of Bailly is like those masterpieces of ancient sculpture, that deserve to be studied in every point of view, and in which new beauties are continually discovered, in proportion as the contemplation is prolonged.

PORTRAIT OF BAILLY.--HIS WIFE.

Nature did not endow Bailly generously with those exterior advantages that please us at first sight. He was tall and thin. His visage compressed, his eyes small and sunk, his nose regular, but of unusual length, and a very brown complexion, constituted an imposing whole, severe and almost glacial. Fortunately, it was easy to perceive through this rough bark, the inexhaustible benevolence of the good man; the kindness that always accompanies a serene mind, and even some rudiments of gayety.

Bailly early endeavoured to model his conduct on that of the Abbe de Lacaille, who directed his first steps in the career of astronomy. And therefore it will be found that in transcribing five or six lines of the very feeling eulogy that the pupil dedicated to the memory of his revered master, I shall have made known at the same time many of the characteristic traits of the panegyrist:

"He was cold and reserved towards those of whom he knew little; but gentle, simple, equable, and familiar in the intercourse of friendship. It is there that, throwing off the grave exterior which he wore in public, he gave himself up to a peaceful and amiable gayety."

The resemblance between Bailly and Lacaille goes no farther. Bailly informs us that the great astronomer proclaimed truth on all occasions, without disquieting himself as to whom it might wound. He would not consent to put vice at its ease, saying:

"If good men thus showed their indignation, bad men being known, and vice unmasked, could no longer do harm, and virtue would be more respected." This Spartan morality could not accord with Bailly's character; he admired but did not adopt it.

Tacitus took as a motto: "To say nothing false, to omit nothing true." Our colleague contented himself in society with the first half of the precept. Never did mockery, bitterness, or severity issue from his lips. His manners were a medium between those of Lacaille and the manners of another academician who had succeeded in not making a single enemy, by adopting the two axioms: "Every thing is possible, and everybody is in the right."

Crebillon obtained permission from the French Academy to make his reception discourse in verse. At the moment when that poet, then almost sixty years of age, said, speaking of himself,

"No gall has ever poisoned my pen,"

the hall reechoed with approbation.

I was going to apply this line by the author of Rhadamistus to our colleague, when accident offered to my sight a passage in which Lalande reproaches Bailly for having swerved from his usual character, in 1773, in a discussion that they had together on a point in the theory of Jupiter's Satellites. I set about the search for this discussion; I found the article by Bailly in a journal of that epoch, and I affirm that this dispute does not contain a word but what is in harmony with all our colleague's published writings. I return therefore to my former idea, and say of Bailly, with perfect confidence,

"No gall had ever poisoned his pen."

Diffidence is usually the trait that the biographers of studious men endeavour most to put in high relief. I dare assert, that in the common acceptation, this is pure flattery. To merit the epithet of diffident, must we think ourselves beneath the competitors of whom we are at least the equals? Must we, in examining ourselves, fail in the tact, in the intelligence, in the judgment, that nature has awarded us, and of which we make so good a use in appreciating the works of others? Oh! then, few learned men can be said to be diffident. Look at Newton: his diffidence is almost as celebrated as his genius. Well, I will extract from two of his letters, scarcely known, two paragraphs which, put side by side, will excite some surprise; the first confirms the general opinion; the second seems with equal force to contradict it. Here are the two passages:

"We are diffident in the presence of Nature."

"We may nobly feel our own strength in the face of man's works."

In my opinion, the opposition in these two passages is only apparent; it will he explained by means of a distinction which I have already slightly indicated.

Bailly's diffidence required the same distinction. When people praised him to his face on the diversity of his knowledge, our colleague did not immediately repel the compliment; but soon after, he would stop his panegyrist, and whisper in his ear with an air of mystery: "I will confide a secret to you, pray do not take advantage of it: I am only a very little less ignorant than another man."

Never did a man act more in harmony with his principles. Bailly was led to reprimand severely a man belonging to the humblest and poorest class of society. Anger does not make him forget that he speaks to a citizen, to a man. "I ask pardon," says the first magistrate of the capital, addressing himself to a rag-gatherer; "I ask your pardon, if I am angry; but your conduct is so reprehensible, that I cannot speak to you otherwise."

Bailly's friends were wont to say that he devoted too much of his patrimony to pleasure. This word was calumniously interpreted. Merard Saint Just has given the true sense of it: "Bailly's pleasure was beneficence."

So eminent a mind could not fail to be tolerant. Such in fact Bailly constantly showed himself in politics, and what is almost equally rare, in regard to religion. In the month of June, 1791, he checked in severe terms the fury with which the multitude appeared to be excited, at the report that at the Theatines some persons had taken the Communion two or three times in one day. "The accusation is undoubtedly false," said the Mayor of Paris; "but if it were true, the public would not have a right to inquire into it. Every one should have the free choice of his religion and his creed." Nothing would have been wanting in the picture, if Bailly had taken the trouble to remark how strange it was, that these violent scruples against repeated Communions emanated from persons who probably never took the Sacrament at all.