"He

a carpenter out of work, called for an omelet.
His address excited doubts, which were
strengthened by a little observation of his
hands, but especially when, being asked how
many eggs should be put in the pan, he
answered a dozen-and then proceeded to
eat the mess with the eagerness of a famish-
ing man, but still with a certain aristocratic
management of spoon and fork. He was
recommended to the notice of the village
authorities, who considered the Latin book
(on which he had written some notes with
his pencil) an insufficient substitute for a
passport; so he was immediately arrested
and sent toward Paris. One of his limbs
was now in a very helpless state, and a vine-
dresser, seeing him limping along between a
couple of officers, kindly offered the use of
his horse, which was accepted and allowed.
It was dark, however, ere they got as far as
the little prison at Bourg-la-Reine, and here
the sergeants deposited him for the night.
When the jailer entered his cell
on the
morning of the 8th, he was a corpse.
had swallowed," says Arago, "a concen-
trated poison which he had carried about with
him for some years in a ring; what it was is
not known, but it is understood that that of
which Napoleon wished to make use at Fon-
tainebleau in 1814 was of the same composi-
tion, and dated from the same epoch." The
editor of the Memoirs of 1824 has a little
more on this point. According to him, in
the tempestuous summer of 1792, the Car-
dinal de Brienne, formerly prime minister to
the King, though he had voted at some elec-
tions of Sens, with the bonnet rouge (not
that of his ecclesiastical rank) upon his head,
was greeted with such looks and cries that
he never recovered his nerve. He requested
Condorcet to procure him the means of self-
destruction in case of need - Condorcet
obtained the prescription of an eminent phy-
sician-gave the Cardinal enough for his
purpose (which was soon afterward enacted),
and retained a dose for himself. Condorcet
was only in his 51st year.

ceeded toward Fontenay-aux-Roses; but | village of Clamart, and describing himself as Condorcet's weak legs, after nine months' total disuse of exercise, were little suited for such a walk, and it was three o'clock ere he reached the country-house of his brotheracademician, Suard. They had been intimate friends for more than twenty years-as the Correspondence shows. Madame Suard, too (sister to the great publisher Pancouke), may be said to have been an important member of the philosophical sect; she was much in the confidence of Voltaire, and had often been of great use to him as well as to his allies and successors. M. Suard appears to have kept himself as much as possible aloof from the troubles of the recent time; it is probable that Condorcet had selected him as the friend who might afford him shelter for a limited space and then set him on with the needful appliances of purse and passport, at the minimum cost of hazard to himself. One of the biographers asserts that Condorcet had no design of asking the Suards to lodge him even for a night-that he was at 3 P. M., as he had been at 10 A. M., annoyed with the want of his snuff-box, and intended no more than to borrow one and proceed. M. Arago says the accounts are so discordant he must decline to offer any opinion. It is agreed, however, that Condorcet dismissed good Sarret at M. Suard's door, which seems to prove that he considered his travels as ended for that day at any rate-and furthermore that M. Suard lent him a snuff-boxand a Horace! The rest of the ascertained circumstances are few. How long he stayed with these friends is not one of them-but he found his night's lodgings among the neighboring quarries of Clamart. Some reporters say that, though M. and Madame Suard found it necessary not to retain him under their roof, they let him out by a postern in their garden, assured him that both that door and a little summer-house adjoining should be left on the latch, and were much distressed next morning to find no signs of his having been in the summer-house. What Madame Vernet says is, we may be sure, true-that her front door, back door, and side door were all on the latch during a week, and that on one of the days she walked to Fontenay-aux-Roses, and loitered for hours about M. Suard's premises-but returned without having received (probably without having ventured to ask for) any information. Condorcet remained in the quarries from the evening of the 5th until the afternoon of the 7th, when driven forth by mere hunger, he appeared in a cabaret of the

very

"Thus died a man who honored Science by his works, France by his high qualities, the human family by his virtues."

So originally ended M. Arago's Biographie, and so it still ends; but it has now a tailpiece of respectable dimensions, occasioned by "divers passages relating to Condorcet in the History of the Girondins." Arago says his attention was directed to these " blemishes

6

the ex-secretary of the Academy, must be put out of the account, for I believe they were not at that time visible from the Rue Servandoni-and I can affirm positively that they were entirely invisible from any window of Madame Vernet's house. I will add, that if Condorcet's passion had been for hearing the flow of waters,' he must have been ill-inspired when he directed his steps to Fontenay-aux-Roses-a flat locality where there existed neither a river nor even the smallest brook, and where in fact he could have no chance of hearing the flow of waters unless in the moment of a heavy shower."

in a beautiful work," by Madame O'Connor, | Luxembourg, which it seems caused a vertigo in who had read its two first volumes with natural eagerness, and laid them down with natural indignation, as she found her father misrepresented wherever he was named. Not doubting that M. Lamartine had, from mere haste, allowed himself to follow the hints of obscure traducers, Arago communicated to him Madame O'Connor's remarks and replies, which he received avec cette bienveillance fascinatrice (the italics are Arago's) dont toutes ses connaissances ont éprouvé les affets. He even did me the honor to request a perusal of my Life of Condorcet, as yet in MS.; and I need not say that I immediately complied with a request so flattering to me." The result, however, is, that M. de Lamartine has neither in subsequent revisions of his earlier volumes, nor in any epilogue or appendix, modified one of the "divers passages.'

We do not imagine our readers would thank us for going into most of the details of this controversy between the two illustrious colleagues of the Institute and of the Provisional Government; but we make room for one topic-the treatment of the escape of the 5th of April, 1794. M. Arago had bestowed all due pains on the history of that incident. M. de Lamartine takes it up in his character of historical romancer:

"Condorcet," says he, "might have been happy and saved, if he could but have waited; but the impatience of his ardent imagination exhausted and destroyed him. He was seized on the return of spring, and at the reverberation of the April

sun against the walls of his chamber, with such a

craving for liberty and movement, such a passion for beholding once more nature and the sky, that Madame Vernet was forced to watch him like a real prisoner, lest he should escape from her benevolent care. He could speak of nothing but the delight of roaming among the fields, of sitting under the shade of a tree, of listening to the song of birds, the murmur of leaves, the flow of waters. The first verdure of the trees of the Luxembourg, which his window had a glimpse of, carried this thirst for air and motion to an actual delirium."

In dealing with these "puerilities," as he does not scruple to call them, M. Arago begins as becomes a man of exact science.

"If," says he, "Condorcet had been dominated by the desire of seating himself under a tree and listening to the murmur of leaves, he could have found that satisfaction without quitting Madame Vernet's house, for there were five large lime-trees in her court. At all events, the trees of the

M. Arago proceeds, however, to say that M. de Lamartine's "inexactitudes have had one good consequence: they led him to hunt out some surviving acquaintance of Sarret's, and one of these possessed a copy of Sarret's own little Traité d'Arithmétique, in the preface to which volume he had given a full and precise account of the incidents with which he was so creditably connected. From this evidence it appears that "on the evening before Condorcet quitted his asylum," a man called there on pretext of looking for lodgings, but whose very particular questions and remarks soon betrayed that he had some different errand. Among other things, "he mentioned searches then going on for saltpetre; and observed, that whoever had any valuables would do well to look to them, for that the agents of this inquest were not the most scrupulous people in the world." Condorcet, his door being ajar, heard the whole of this, and did not conceal the impression it made on him. M. Sarret does not doubt

that the stranger was some well-wisher—and he adds, that in point of fact next morning's post brought a letter to Condorcet, without signature, but expressly warning him that the house was to be searched that very day

there being a suspicion that it harbored fugitives from the south: which letter was found on his table after he had fled. M. Arago's summing up is

"On ne trouve point, comme on voit, dans cette relation aucune trace de l'impatience juvédéplorable de Condorcet." nile qui, suivant M. de Lamartine, amena la fin

Certainly not; but the result will astonish the Histoire des Girondins. no one who has bestowed any attention on add, is there any perversion of fact even in Nor, we must that meretricious farrago more gross than some which disfigure this Life of Condorcet by a graver Academician.

From the Dublin University Magazine.

THE WONDERS OF MODERN LOCOMOTION.

WHEN the political storms which are agi-, communication by land is the lateness of tating nations shall have subsided-when the revolutionary madness shall have gone through its appointed phases-when its leaders and promoters, raised to a factitious elevation, and surrounded with a spurious celebrity, shall have been reduced to their proper stature, and divested of their false splendor, by the inexorable sentence of a dispassionate posterity-one monument raised by the present generation will stand, commanding a respect and admiration which time cannot diminish nor revolutions reverse.

cal evidence. In 1843, the number of pas-
sengers booked on the railways of the United
Kingdom was, in round numbers, twenty-
three and a half millions. In 1848, it rose
to sixty millions!-that is to say, five mil-
lions per month, or about 170,000 per day!

range of language, terms sufficiently expressive | it were not attested by undeniable statisti-
to describe this infernal road. Let me most se-
riously caution all travelers who may accidentally
propose to travel this terrible country to avoid it
as they would the devil, for a thousand to one
they break their necks or their limbs by over-
throws or breakings down. They will here meet
with ruts, which I actually measured, four feet
deep, and floating with mud, only from a wet
summer. What, therefore, must it be after a
winter? The only mending it receives is tum-
bling in some loose stones, which serve no other
purpose than jolting a carriage in the most in-
tolerable manner. These are not merely opin-
ions, but facts; for I actually passed three carts
broken down in these eighteen miles of execrable
memory.'

6

"He says of a road near Warrington, This is a paved road, most infamously bad. Any person would imagine the people of the country had made it with a view to immediate destruction! for the breadth is only sufficient for one carriage; consequently it is cut at once into ruts; and you may easily conceive what a break-down, dislocating road, ruts cut through a pavement must be.'

"He says of a road near Newcastle, 'A more dreadful road cannot be imagined. I was obliged to hire two men at one place to support my chaise from overturning. Let me persuade all travelers to avoid this terrible country, which must either dislocate their bones with broken pavements, or bury them in muddy sand.""-pp. 32-34.

It would be difficult to find, in the history of human progress, a fact more striking than that pointed out by the author of "Railway Economy," that the precise ground traveled over by Young is now literally reticulated with railways, over which tens of thousands of passengers are transported daily at a speed varying from thirty to fifty miles an hour!

The work before us supplies a very curious analysis of this vast intercourse of the individuals forming the hive of British industry and enterprise. It appears that about half the total number of passengers are of the third class, and that only one eighth of the whole belong to the first class. This is a fact as unexpected as it is important. It might naturally have been supposed, that the affluent classes, the bourgeoisie and those who are raised above subsistence on the mere wages of labor, would form the staple of railway passengers. We have before us "facts and figures" which incontestibly establish the reverse. The laborious class, the penny-a-milers, form, after all, the great customers of the railway proprietors.

But it may be supposed, that although the inferior class may travel in greater numbers, this may be more than compensated by the greater distances traveled by the superior classes. Here again, however, our previsions are delusive. True it is, that the average distances traveled by third class are less than those traveled by first class passengers but this difference bears no proportion to the enormous difference of the number of travelers of the two classes respectively. Taking the number and distances traveled together, it is found that the third class passengers supply from forty-two to forty-three per cent. of the business of the raliways; while the first class passengers alone supply less than twenty per cent. of it.

The augmentation of the internal intercourse which necessarily followed the construction of railways, forms one of the most extraordinary facts in statistics. Before the From facts like those, railway directors opening of the railway between Liverpool may learn a useful lesson. This is not the and Manchester, the number of passengers, first unlooked-for truth which experience has daily, between those places, did not exceed disclosed. It will not be forgotten, that four hundred. Immediately after the facility when railways were first projected, passenof railway transport was present, the num-ger-traffic was never seriously contemplated; ber amounted to 1600! Nor was this increase merely a sudden change, succeeded by a stationary, or a nearly stationary, rate of intercourse. The public did not at once understand the value and importance of the facilities of intercourse thus presented. They were, however, more and more justly appreciated, from year to year, and we find accordingly, that the amount of traveling underwent an increase, in the space of a few years, which would be deemed fabulous, if

and grave engineering authorities declared,
that no sane person could contemplate the
practicability of traveling upon them at so
great a speed as twelve miles an hours!

Among the noticeable facts brought to
light on the volume before us are, the aver-
age distances traveled by different classes of
passengers. One of the consequeness which
was expected to ensue from the improved fa-
cilities offered by railways was, that passen-
gers would be induced, by the great cheap-