of the Convention, of whom Condorcet was one, laid before it their
project for the New Constitution of the Year II., to which Condorcet had
written an elaborate Preface. The project was not taken. Hérault de
Séchelles made a new one. In his bold and scathing criticism upon
it--his ‘Appeal to the French Citizens on the Project of the New
Constitution’--Condorcet signed his own condemnation.
On July 8, 1793, Chabot denounced that ‘Appeal’ at the Convention. This
ex-Marquis, he said, is ‘a coward, a scoundrel, and an Academician.’ ‘He
pretends that his Constitution is better than yours; that primary
assemblies ought to be accepted; _therefore_ I propose that he ought to
be arrested and brought to the bar.’ On the strength of this logical
reasoning and without evidence of any kind against him, the Convention
decreed that Condorcet’s papers should be sealed and that he should be
put under arrest and on the list of those who were to be tried before
the Revolutionary Tribunal on the coming third of October. He was
further condemned in his absence and declared to be _hors la loi_.
If it is doubtful whether Condorcet realised the probable effect of his
opinion and vote in the matter of the King’s trial, he had realised to
the full the jeopardy in which the ‘Appeal’ would place him. But he
looked now, as he had looked always, not to the effect his deeds might
have on his own destiny, but to their effect on the destiny of the race.
If the unit could but do his part for the mass, then, having done it, he
must be content to be trampled under its feet, happy, if on his dead
body some might rise and catch a glimpse of a Promised Land.
But yet he must save himself if he could.
For seven years, through storms of which the story still shakes men’s
souls, he had known in his own home, first on the Quai de Conti and then
in the Rue de Lille, the deep, calm joys of his happy marriage. When the
troubles of life come only from without, through the fiercest of such
troubles man and wife may be happy still. It is those evils alone which
rise from their own characters which can wholly destroy the beauty of
life. In the serene tenderness of the woman who kept for ever, it is
said, some of the virgin freshness of the girl, who united to strength
gentleness, and to courage quietness, who was at once modest and clever,
simple and intelligent, Condorcet was given a rich share of the best
earth has to offer.
Their _salon_, of course, was no more. The beating of the pitiless storm
had driven their Englishmen to covert in happier England. But it is
only when one is discontented with one’s relatives that there is crying
need of acquaintances. These two still had each other and their child.
Condorcet had much to lose.
To go to the Rue de Lille would be courting death. He escaped first to
his country home at Auteuil. From there, two friendly doctors took him
to a house in the Rue Servandoni, belonging to Madame Vernet, the widow
of the sculptor, and asked her to shelter a proscribed man. She only
inquired if he was good and virtuous. When they answered, ‘Yes,’ she
consented at once. ‘Do not lose a moment, you can tell me about him
later.’ Regarding the value of the works of her husband there have been
many opinions, but as to the value of her work there can be only one.
Perfectly aware that she was endangering her life for a fugitive whom
she had never seen, and who had not the slightest claim upon her
generosity, she sheltered him for nine months, providing him all the
time with every necessary of life and without the smallest hope of
repayment. When he did leave her at last, he had to steal away from her
self-sacrificing care by a subterfuge, like a thief. Strong, simple and
energetic, high in courage and devotion, Madame Vernet is one of the
unsung heroines of history.
Condorcet’s condition was destitute indeed. As an outlaw all his money
had been seized. For himself that might have been bearable; even to the
fate he foresaw too clearly he could be indifferent--for himself. One
Sarret, to whom Madame Vernet was privately married and who lived in the
house, speaks of the fugitive’s gentleness, patience, and resignation.
He had given to his country his talents, his time, his fortune, his
rank; and when she turned and rent him, he had for her nothing but
compassion and the strong hope of a day that would dawn upon her clear
and fair, after the storm was past.
But in the knowledge that he had brought ruin and disgrace on what he
loved best in the world, Condorcet sounded one of the great deeps of
human suffering. As the wife of an outlaw, Madame de Condorcet was not
only penniless, but could not even sleep in the capital. Wholly
dependent on her was her little girl of three years old, a young sister,
and an old governess. She was herself still young and brought up in a
class unused to work, in the sense of work to make money, for
generations. But there was in her soul the great courage of a great
love. The talents which had once charmed her _salon_ she now turned to a
means of livelihood. When her house at Auteuil was invaded by Republican
soldiers, Madame softened their hearts and earned a pittance by taking
their portraits. Twice a week, disguised as a peasant, she came on foot
from Auteuil to Paris, passed through the gates with the fierce crowds
thronging to the executions in the Place de la Révolution, and by
painting miniatures of the condemned in the prisons, of proscribed men
lying hidden in strange retreats, or of middle-class citizens, made
enough to support her little household. Then, sometimes, she would creep
to the Rue Servandoni, and for a few minutes forget parting, death, and
the terrors of the unknown future, in her husband’s arms. He might well
write, as he did write but a little while before he died, that even then
he was not all unhappy--he had served his country and had had her heart.
He spent the long days of his hiding almost entirely in writing. He
began by an exposition of his principles and conduct during the
Revolution, and gave an account of his whole public career. He was
writing it when, on October 3, 1793, he was tried, in his absence,
before the Revolutionary Tribunal, with Vergniaud, Brissot, and others,
accused of conspiring against the unity of the Republic, declared an
emigrant, and condemned to death.
On the 31st of the same month came the fall of the Girondins. Though not
himself a Girondin they had been once his friends, and in their ruin he
saw the immediate presage of his own; and his own meant that also of
Madame Vernet. He went to her at once. ‘The law is clear; if I am
discovered here you will die as I shall. I am _hors la loi_; I cannot
remain here longer. She answered that though he might be _hors la loi_
he was not outside the law of humanity; and bade him stay where he was.
His wife, in her peasant’s dress, came to him then for one of those
brief moments, stolen from Heaven. She knew him well. That
‘Justification’ of his conduct, his Apologia, that looking back on deeds
and sacrifices meant to bring the Golden Age to men and which _had_
brought, or so it seemed, the hell of the Terror--this was no fit work
for him now. Look ahead! Look on to that new country which your pure
patriotism and your self-devotion,--ay, and this Terror itself--shall
have helped to make--that warless world of equal rights and ever
widening knowledge, the beautiful dream of a sinless and sorrowless
earth, which may yet be realised, in part.
On the manuscript of the ‘Justification’ there is written in her hand
‘_Left at my request to write the History of the Progress of the Human
Mind_.’
In the very shadow of death, Condorcet told the story of men’s advance
toward life, of the evolution of their understanding from the earliest
times until now. Calm, just, and serene, with not an intemperate line,
not an angry thought, the ‘Progress’ reads as if it had been written by
some tranquil philosopher who had seen his plan for man’s redemption
adopted, and had received for his labour honours, peace, and competence.
Its fault, indeed, is its too sanguine idealism. Condorcet, like many
enthusiasts, thought his own way of salvation for man the only way; he
believed his own magnificent dream to be the only possible Utopia.
Beneath the guillotine and in social convulsions for which history has
no parallel, he looked through and past them, in that last great
chapter, in the exalted spirit of noble prophecy, to that Golden Age
which _must_ surely come!
But ‘The Progress of the Human Mind’ is something more than a splendid
hope, more than the greatest and most famous of its author’s works. It
bears highest testimony to the character of him who in the supreme hour
of his individual life could thus forget himself, and in the midst of
personal ruin, foresee with exultant joy the salvation of the race.
It remains for ever among the masterpieces which men cannot afford to
forget.
During his hiding Condorcet also wrote ‘The Letter of Junius to William
Pitt’ in which he expresses his aversion to Pitt, and an essay, never
printed, ‘On the Physical Degradation of the Royal Races.’ He also
planned a universal philosophical language.
In December, 1793, he wrote ‘The Letter of a Polish Exile in Siberia to
his Wife’--a poem in which another exile bade farewell to the woman he
loved.
The death-shadows were creeping closer now.
In March, 1794, he finished ‘The Progress of the Human Mind.’ But before
that he had decided to leave Madame Vernet; her danger was too great.
Early in January he had begun writing his last wishes, the ‘Advice of a
Proscribed Father to his Daughter.’ The little girl was the child of too
deep a love not to be infinitely dear. To what was he leaving her?
Throughout these cruel months, the last drop in his cup of bitterness
had been the strong conviction that his wife would share his own fate,
was doomed, like himself, to the guillotine. ‘If my daughter is destined
to lose everything,’--even to himself he could not frame the dread
thought in plainer words. But if even that thing must be, then he left
Madame Vernet the guardian of his child, begging that she might have a
liberal education which would help her to earn her own livelihood, and,
in particular, that she might learn English, so that if need came she
could seek the help of her mother’s English friends.
To the little girl herself he left words of calm and beautiful counsel,
which are in themselves a possession. Some of that ‘light that never was
on sea or land’ lies surely on those tender and gracious lines,
something of the serene illumination that shines from a dying face.
In the early morning of April 5, 1794, the Marquis de Condorcet laid
down his pen for the last time.
At ten o’clock on that day he slipped out of the house in the Rue
Servandoni, unknown to Madame Vernet, and in spite of the passionate
protests of Sarret, her husband, who followed him out into the street,
praying him to return. Condorcet was in his usual disguise; many months’
confinement indoors, and the old weakness in his limbs, made walking a
difficulty. He was at the door almost of the fatal prisons of the Carmes
and the Luxembourg; but no persuasions could make him return. He had
heard rumours of a domiciliary visit to be made immediately to Madame
Vernet’s house and, were he found there, she _must_ be ruined. Sarret
implored in vain. The fugitive reached the Maine barrier in safety and
turned in the direction of Fontenay-aux-Roses. At every step his pain
and difficulty in walking increased. But at three o’clock in the
afternoon he safely reached the country house of his old friends, the
Suards.
Madame Suard may be remembered as the very enthusiastic and vivacious
little lady who once visited Voltaire, who has left behind her
entertaining ‘Letters,’ and who has recorded Voltaire’s warm love and
admiration for her friend Condorcet. ‘Our dear and good Condorcet,’
Madame Suard had called him. She and her husband (who was a well-known
journalist and wit) had been his intimate friends in prosperity; how
could he do better than come to them in his need?
It must in justice be said of the Suards that the accounts of their
conduct are confused. But the generally accepted, as well as the most
probable, story does not redound to their credit. True, they had many
excuses; but there has never been any act of treachery for which the
treacherous have not been able to adduce a plausible reason.
Condorcet asked for one night’s lodging, and M. Suard replied that such
hospitality would be quite as dangerous for Condorcet himself as for
them. Still, they could give him money, some ointment for a chafed leg
due to his long walk, and a copy of Horace--to amuse his leisure!
Further, we will not lock our garden-gate to-night so that in case of
urgent need you can make use of it! With this, they sent him away.
Madame Vernet, searching for him in that neighbourhood a little while
after, declared that she tried the garden-gate and found it rusty and
immovable. Her own door, in lawless Paris, was open night and day that,
if he should return to her, she should not fail him. Whether he
attempted to make use of the Suards’ timid hospitality is not known. One
would think of Condorcet that he did not.
The day of April 6 he spent in sufferings and privations which can only
be guessed.
On April 7, a tall man, gaunt and famished, with a wound in his leg,
went into an inn of Clamart and asked for an omelette. Mine host,
looking at him suspiciously, inquired how many eggs he would have in his
omelette. The Marquis, with no kind of idea of the number of eggs a
working-man, or any man for that matter, expects in his omelette, said a
dozen. M. Crépinet, the innkeeper, was a shrewd person as well as one of
the municipals of the Commune. A queer workman this! Your name? Peter
Simon, was the answer. Papers? I have none. Occupation? Well, on the
spur of the moment, a carpenter. His hands, whose only tool had been a
pen, gave him the lie. Crépinet, pleased with his own sharpness, had
this strange carpenter arrested and marched toward Bourg-la-Reine.
How in these supreme moments Condorcet felt and acted, is not on record.
But in the great crises men unconsciously produce that character which
they have formed in the trivial round of daily life, and he who would be
great at great moments must be a great character by his own fireside and
in the dull routine of his ordinary work. The strong, quiet Condorcet
was surely strong and quiet still--‘the victim of his foes,’ as he had
said, ‘but never their instrument or their dupe.’ On that weary way, a
compassionate vine-dresser took pity on his limping condition, and lent
him a horse.
On the morning of April 8, 1794, when the jailor of the prison of
Bourg-la-Reine came to hand over the new prisoner to the _gendarmes_ who
had arrived to take him to Paris, the Marquis de Condorcet was found
dead in his cell. With a powerful preparation of opium and stramonium
prepared by his friend Cabanis, the celebrated physician, and which
Condorcet had long carried about with him in his ring, he had ‘cheated
the guillotine.’ It was remembered afterwards, that when he left the
Suards’ house, he had turned saying, ‘If I have one night before me, I
fear no man; but I will not be taken to Paris.’
That he who gave his life to the people should have defrauded them, as
it were, of his death, strikes the one discord in the clear harmony of
this true soul.
Better that a Condorcet, like many a lesser man, should have mounted the
guillotine as a king mounts his throne, proud to die for the cause for
which he had lived, and hearing through the blasphemy and the
execrations of the rabble below, the far-off music of a free and happy
people.
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.
In the breadth and the generosity of his self-sacrifice for the public
good, he remains for ever one of the noblest, not only of the Friends of
Voltaire, but of the sons of France.
INDEX
‘Advance, The, of the Mind of Man’ (Turgot), 208
‘Advantages, The, of Christianity’ (Turgot), 208
‘Advice of a Proscribed Father, The’ (Condorcet), 291
Aine, Madame d’, 54, 123, 131, 132, 136
Alembert, Jean Lerond d’, 45, 47, 72, 124-5, 133, 136,
199, 213, 269, 271, 275;
birth and parentage, 2-4;
at Madame Rousseau’s, 4-6;
education, 6-8;
mathematical studies, 8-9;
publishes ‘Treatise on Dynamics’ and ‘Theory of Winds,’ 10;
death of his mother, 10;
acquaintance with Diderot, 11;
writes ‘Preface’ to Encyclopædia, 12-13;
offered Presidency of Berlin Academy, 13-14;
member of the French Academy, 14;
visits Voltaire, 15;
writes ‘Geneva,’ 15-16;
retires from Encyclopædia, 16-17;
publishes ‘Elements of Philosophy,’ 17;
visits Berlin, 18;
his attachment to Mlle. de Lespinasse, 18-23;
their _salon_, 23-24;
publishes ‘History of the Destruction of the Jesuits,’ 25;
second visit to Voltaire, 25-26;
made Perpetual Secretary of Academy, 26;
illness and death of Mlle. de Lespinasse, 27-23;
his unhappiness and death, 29-30;
his work and character, 30-31
‘Appeal to the French Citizens’ (Condorcet), 284-5
Argental, Comte d’, 113
Artois, Comte d’, 253, 262
‘Banise’ (Grimm), 152
‘Barber of Seville, The’ (Beaumarchais), 247-50, 261-2
Beaumarchais, Caron de, birth and early life, 236-7;
first marriage, 238;
at Court, 238-40;
visits Spain, 240-1;
produces ‘Eugénie,’ 241;
second marriage, 241-2;
the Goezman lawsuit and ‘Memoirs,’ 243-6;
acts as secret agent, 246-7;
produces ‘Barber of Seville,’ 247-50;
edits Voltaire’s Works, 250;
various employments, 251;
advertises ‘Figaro,’ 252;
produces it at Gennevilliers, 253-4;
and at the Comédie, 254-60;
imprisoned in St. Lazare, 261;
sees ‘Barber of Seville’ at Trianon, 261-2;
quarrels with Mirabeau, 263;
third marriage, 263;
his part in the Revolution, 263-6;
produces ‘Guilty Mother,’ 266;
death and character, 266-7
Beaumarchais, Madame (Mme. Francquet), 237-8
Beaumarchais, Madame (Mme. Lévêque), 241-2
Beaumarchais, Madame (Mlle. Willermaula), 263, 266
Beaumarchais, Mademoiselle Eugénie, 263, 266
Bergasse (lawyer), 263
Bernis, Cardinal de, 33, 269
Blache, Comte de la, 243, 244
‘Blind, Letter on the’ (Diderot), 41, 42
Brienne, Loménie de, 208, 209, 210
Bueil, Comtesse de, 172, 173, 174
Buffon, Comte de, 127, 200
Cabanis, Doctor, 204, 295, 296
Catherine the Great, 18, 56-8, 158, 168-70, 171, 174
Charles Edward Stuart, Prince, 182-3
Châtelet, Madame du, 42, 180
Chaulnes, Duc de, 243
Choiseul, Duc de, 69, 70, 73, 83
‘Christianity Unveiled’ (d’Holbach), 140-1
Cicé, Abbé de, 208, 209, 224
Clavijo, 240-1
‘Clergy, The Mind of the’ (d’Holbach), 141
‘Commentary on Horace’ (Galiani), 73, 94
‘Commentary on Pascal’ (Condorcet), 272
Condorcet, Mademoiselle de, 277, 291-2, 296-7
Condorcet, Marquis de, 24, 25, 29, 30, 196, 199, 221-2;
his position and birth, 268;
education, 269-270;
character, 270-1;
visits Voltaire, 271-2;
made Secretary of Academy of Sciences, 272-3;
work with Turgot, 274;
member of French Academy, 275;
marriage, 275-7;
as Women’s Rights champion, 277;
as a politician, 278-9;
at the trial of Louis XVI., 280-3;
writes ‘Appeal’ and is proscribed, 284-6;
in hiding, 286-292;
writes ‘Progress of Human Mind,’ &c., 289-91;
his wanderings, 292-5;
arrest and death, 295;
work and character, 297-8
Condorcet, Marquise de (Mlle. de Grouchy), 275-7, 285-6, 287-8, 289, 296-7
‘Corn Trade, Dialogues on the’ (Galiani), 62, 68, 86-90, 226
‘Corn Trade, Letters on the’ (Turgot), 226
‘Counsels to a Young Man’ (Vauvenargues), 103, 111
Daubinière, Madame, 85, 93
Dazincourt (actor), 255, 261
Deffand, Madame du, 18-19, 195
Destouches, General, 3, 4, 6
‘Destruction of the Jesuits, History of the’ (d’Alembert), 25, 133
Diderot, Angélique. _See_ Vandeul, Mme. de
Diderot, Denis, 11, 17, 30, 88, 125, 128, 130, 131,
138, 143, 163, 165, 168, 170, 191-2, 199, 202;
education, 32-3;
early life in Paris, 34-6;
marriage, 37-8; episode of Mme. Puisieux, 39;
writes ‘Essay on Merit and Virtue’ and ‘Philosophical Thoughts,’ 39;
birth of his daughter, 40;
writes ‘Letter on the Blind,’ 41;
prisoner in Vincennes, 42-3;
works at Encyclopædia, 43-8;
miscellaneous labours, 49-51;
episode of Mlle. Volland, 51;
visits _salons_, 52-3;
visits Grandval, 53-6;
produces plays, 56;
visits Catherine the Great, 56-8;
sees Voltaire, 58-9;
illness and death, 60-1;
estimate of his work and character, 61
Diderot, Madame (Mlle. Anne Toinette Champion), 36-9, 40-1, 51, 60-1
‘Dynamics, Treatise on’ (d’Alembert), 10
‘Elements of Philosophy’ (d’Alembert), 17, 72
Encyclopædia, The, 11-13, 14, 15-17, 43-8, 56, 121, 133, 150, 213
‘Épinay, Correspondence with Madame d’ (Galiani), 68
Épinay (Madame d’), 52-3, 79-80, 93, 125, 163-7, 172
‘Eugénie’ (Beaumarchais), 241
‘Existence’ (Turgot), 133, 213
‘Fame and Pleasure, Discourses on’ (Vauvenargues), 103
‘Father of the Family, The’ (Diderot), 56
Fel, Mademoiselle (opera dancer), 150-1, 166
‘Figaro, The Marriage of’ (Beaumarchais), 252-60
Franklin, Benjamin, 129-30, 204
Frederick the Great, 10, 13-14, 17-18, 88, 144, 156, 158, 167-8, 202
Fréron, Élie (journalist), 88