Part 16

In May, 1776, a Queen of one-and-twenty demanded that ‘le sieur Turgot fût chassé, même envoyé à la Bastille’; and, in part, she had her way, for her own ruin and that of France. Condorcet renounced his Inspectorship of Coinage; he would not serve under another master. Turgot’s death in 1781 was the first great sorrow of his life. His other friend, d’Alembert, won for him a seat in the French Academy in 1782; and in the next year he too died. Condorcet tended him to the last, with that quiet and generous devotion which says little and does much. D’Alembert left to him the task of providing annuities for two old servants, and Condorcet accepted the obligation as a privilege, and fulfilled it scrupulously in his own poverty and ruin.

He was now not a little lonely. His relatives still resented his choice of a profession; his best friends were dead; the great Master of their party had preceded them. From ‘social duties falsely so called’ Caritat had long ago freed himself. He was three and forty years old, occupied in writing that ‘Life of Turgot’ which is a declaration of his own principles and policy, in contributing to the Encyclopædia, and in many public labours, when he first met Mademoiselle Sophie de Grouchy.

If the supreme blessing of life be a happy marriage, then Condorcet was a fortunate man indeed. Mademoiselle was full twenty years younger than himself, very girlish in face and figure, with a bright cultivated mind, and a rare capacity for love and tenderness. He found in her what is uncommon even in happy marriages perhaps--his wife was also his friend. From the first she shared his work and his love for his fellow-men, approved of his sacrifices, and was true not only to him, but to his example of unselfish courage and unflinching devotion, to the end of her life.

For the moment--for what a brief moment!--their world looked smiling enough.

Condorcet abandoned himself to his happiness, with the deep passion of a strong man who has never wasted his heart in lighter feelings. For a dowry--so essential to a French marriage--he wholly forgot to stipulate. For the opinion of his friends, who considered a married geometrician as a sort of freak of Nature, he cared nothing; and when they saw his wife, and forgave him, their pardon was as little to him as their blame.

The two settled on the Quai de Conti in a house where Caritat had previously lived with his mother. At that Hôtel des Monnaies Sophie held her _salon_ (_le foyer de la République_, men called it), where she received, with a youthful charm and grace, not only her husband’s French political friends, but also Lord Stormont the English Ambassador, Wilkes, Garrick, Sterne, Hume, Robertson, Gibbon, Mackintosh, and Adam Smith.

Large and shy, with a little awkwardness even in his manner, it was not Condorcet but his wife who was socially successful. She was the one woman in a thousand who estimated social success at its low, just value, and was great in knowing her husband to be much greater.

Only two years after their marriage, in 1788, Condorcet entered the arena as one of the earliest and most noteworthy of all champions of Women’s Rights. On the ground of their equal intelligence he claimed for them equal privileges with men, and ignored the very suggestion that their bodily weakness and inferiority are reproduced in their minds. He judged, in fact, all women from one woman. No nobler testimony can be borne to the intellect and character of the Marquise de Condorcet than to say that she deserved as an individual what her example made her husband think of her sex.

It is not a little curious to note that Condorcet, though so wholly faithful and happy himself in the relationship, thought the indissolubility of marriage an evil. In later years, he pleaded warmly for the condemnation of mercenary marriages by public opinion, as one of the best means of lessening the inequalities of wealth.

In 1790, the profound happiness of his wedded life was crowned by the birth of his only child, a daughter. Before that, the fierce whirlpool of politics had drawn him into it, and he had addressed the electors of the States-General and appeared publicly as the enemy of sacerdotalism and aristocracy, with all his gospel based on two great principles--the natural rights of man and the mutable nature of the constitutions which govern him. He was made member of the municipality of Paris, and in that, his first public function, flung the gauntlet before his caste and broke for ever with an order of which the smug selfishness was admirably typified by a Farmer-General who said to him, ‘Why alter things? _We_ are very comfortable.’

The fall of the Bastille, the insurrection of October, the journey of the Royal Family to Paris, he had watched with the calm of one who knows that such things must needs be, who realises the necessity of painful means to a glorious end. To the monarchy he was not at first opposed. If the King were but a man! But when in June, 1791, came the ignominious flight to Varennes, Condorcet rose in a fierce, still wrath and proclaimed the necessity for a Republic. ‘The King has freed himself from us, we are freed from him,’ said he. ‘This flight enfranchises us from all our obligations.’

Nearly all the Marquis’s friends broke with him, and he stood alone. Before his ripened views on royalty were fully known, it had been proposed that he should be the tutor of the Dauphin, and to Sophie that she should be the _gouvernante_. Husband and wife were in different places when the proposals were made; but, though they had never spoken with each other on the subject, they declined the offers almost in the same words. If Condorcet’s friends misunderstood him and parted at the parting of the ways, his wife never did.

In 1791, he was elected member for Paris in the Legislative Assembly and became in quick succession its Secretary and its President. As its President, he presented to it his Educational Scheme, startlingly modern in its demands that education should be free and unsectarian.

By the order of the Assembly, in 1792, there was burnt in Paris an immense number of the brevets and patents of nobility--among them the patent of Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet--at the very moment when at the bar of the tribune Condorcet himself demanded that the same measure should be adopted all over France. Not one dissentient voice was raised against the scheme; who, indeed, should dissent from it when a marquis proposed it? A few months later he was elected Member of the National Convention for the Department of Aisne, and the extremist of the Legislative Assembly found himself all too moderate for the Convention.

Then came the trial of the King.

There was never a time when Condorcet could be called either an orator or a leader of men. Though he had written most of its official addresses, he had appeared but little before the Legislative Assembly. Nervousness caused him always to read any speeches he did make, and a delicate voice robbed them of their effectiveness. His deeds and his character earned him a hearing and applause; and sometimes his complete self-devotion and the white heat of his enthusiasm discounted his manner and touched his hearers with something of his own deathless passion. But he was, as d’Alembert said, a volcano covered with snow, and that audience of his, coarse in fibre, mad for excitement, overwrought, uncontrolled, must needs see the mountain in flames, vomiting lava and death.

To be a great orator one must have in a supreme degree the qualities one’s hearers have in a lesser degree. The thoughtful reason and the lofty ideals of Condorcet found little counterpart in the parliaments of the Revolution. A Marat or a Danton for us! Or a Fouquier-Tinville even, drunk with blood, with his wild hair flung back, and his words shaking with passion; but not this noble, with the high courage of his caste, his ‘stoical Roman face,’ his stern truthfulness, his unworldly enthusiasms. Worse than all, Condorcet never was for a cause, but always for a principle; and since he followed no party blindly, he was in turn abused by all.

He proved in his own history that to be a great demagogue it is essential to be without too fine a scrupulousness and the more delicate virtues; that successfully to lead the vulgar the first requisite is not to be too much of a gentleman.

Condorcet, although he had broken with monarchy as a possible form of government for France, had still no personal feeling against the monarch. Firmly convinced of his culpability, he was equally convinced that the Convention was not legally competent to judge its King at all; and proposed that he should be tried by a tribunal chosen by the electors of the Departments of France. But to take the judging of its sovereign from the Convention was to take the prey whose blood he has tasted from the tiger. When the great moment came, Condorcet was at Auteuil; he hastened to Paris, and arrived at the Assembly a few moments before the King.

What a strange contrast was this Marquis--serene in strong purpose, with his ‘just mind justly fixed,’ great in his compassion for his country and not without compassion for his King--to that poor Bourbon, ‘who means well had he any fixed meaning,’ and whom Condorcet himself described in an admirable but rarely quoted description as standing before his judges, ‘uneasy, rather than frightened; courageous, but without dignity.’

On January 15, 1793, to the momentous question if the prisoner at the bar were guilty, Condorcet answered, ‘Yes:’ he had conspired against liberty. On the 17th and 18th the vote was taken on the nature of the punishment to be awarded. Consider the judgment-hall filled with the fierce faces and wild natures of men who, for centuries starved of their liberties, had drunk the first maddening draught of power. Consider that among them this noble alone represented a class they hated worse than they hated royalty itself, that if he had forsworn it, broken with it, denied it, he had still its high bearing, its maddening self-possession and self-control. We vote for death--shall you dare to know better? An Orleans sitteth and speaketh against his own kin; why not a noble, then, who owes him nothing? Condorcet rises in his place and pronounces for exile--the severest penalty in the penal code which is not death. ‘The punishment of death is against my principles, and I shall not vote for it. I propose further that the decision of the Convention shall be ratified by an appeal to the people.’

On Saturday, January 19, 1793, the execution of the King having been fixed for the Monday, Condorcet implored his colleagues to neutralise the fatal effect of their decision on the other European Powers by abolishing the punishment of death altogether. With the Terror then struggling to the birth in her wild breast, one of the greatest children of his country begged for the suppression of that penalty as the most ‘efficacious way of perfecting human-kind in destroying that leaning to ferocity which has long dishonoured it. Punishments which admit of correction and repentance are the only ones fit for regenerated humanity.’

In the roar of that fierce storm of human passions, the quiet voice was unheeded, but not unheard. There were those who looked up at the speaker, and remembered his words--for his ruin.

How far, up to this point, Condorcet realised his danger is hard to say. A Louis, with the fatal blindness of kingship, might believe to the last that his person really _was_ inviolable, that from the tumbril itself loyal hands would deliver his majesty from the insult of a malefactor’s death. But a Condorcet?

The immediate result of his part in the King’s trial was that his name was struck from the roll of the Academies of St. Petersburg and Berlin. That insult touched him so little that there is not a single allusion to it in his writings.

In the month succeeding the King’s death, a Commission of nine members 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.