384 MEMOIR OP HAUY. 



this coincidence in the result of operations conducted separately and 

 without concert was, in his eyes, a decisive triumph for crystallography. 



It was imperative on a man who served the sciences after this manner 

 to devote himself exclusively to them. By the counsel of Lhomond 

 himself, when the twenty years' service requisite for a pension of emer- 

 itus in the University was fulfilled, Haiiy lost no time in demanding it. 

 He had, besides, a small benefice, the whole not amounting to more 

 than what was strictly needful; but for him, who knew no pleasure 

 but in work, it would have sufficed if that needful, at least, had been 

 assured to him. Unfortunately, he was to learn, within a very short 

 time, that the effects of human passions are not so easily calculated as 

 those of the forces of nature. 



It will be recollected with what imprudence the Constituent Assem- 

 bly, under the control of factious spirits, allowed itself to combine 

 theological disputes with all the other disputes which then agitated 

 France, thus doubling the asperity of political quarrels by giving them 

 the character of religious persecutions. The new form of government 

 imposed on the Church had divided the clergy, and the men who wished 

 to carry the revolution to extremes took a pleasure in exasperating their 

 dissensions. Such ecclesiastics as resisted innovation were deprived of 

 their places and pensions, and Haiiy, whose scrupulous piety consigned 

 him to that class, found himself in a moment as poor as on the day 

 when he aspired to the situation of singing boy. 



He would have been content, however, had he been allowed to live 

 by his labors ; but the persecutors could not be satisfied with a first 

 vexation. One of the earliest acts of the reckless men who mounted 

 to power on the ruins of the throne, August 10, 1792, was to imprison 

 the priests who had not taken the prescribed oath, and the scientific 

 celebrity of Haiiy furnished but a reason the more for including him 

 in the common lot. 



Little aware, in his solitude, of what was passing around him, it 

 was with surprise that he one day saw a party of rough men insolently 

 entering his modest retreat. They begin by demanding if he has fire- 

 arms. "None but this," said Haiiy, drawing at the same time a spark 

 from his electric machine. For an instant these brutal personages feel 

 themselves disarmed ; but the next, they proceeded to seize upon his 

 papers, which contain nothing but algebraic formulas; overturn the 

 collection, his only property; and end with conducting him to the 

 Seminary St. Firmin, contiguous to the College Lemoine, and recently 

 converted into a prison, where all the priests and professors of that 

 part of Paris were confined. 



One cell for another made but little difference to Haiiy. Tranquil- 

 ized, moreover, at finding himself in the midst of many of his friends, 

 he felt but little concern, except to send for his cabinet of drawers and 

 •endeavor to restore his crystals to order. Happily, outside the prison 

 there were friends of his, better informed as to the course which things 

 were taking. 



Geoffroy de Saint Hilaire, Haiiy 's pupil and subsequently his col- 

 league in this Academy, lodged, then, at the College Lemoine. No 

 sooner did he learn what had happened, than he hastened to implore 



