CONDORCET : A BIOGRAPHY. 193 



him. After much solicitation, Mairan consented to occupy provisionally 

 the place iu order to allow the learned body time enough to make a 

 choice they would not afterwards regpet. It was finally concluded that 

 the only v\ay to avoid all disagieeable comparison, was to give to the 

 nephew of Corneille a successor trho would not aspire to imitate him, 

 and who would disarm all criticism by his extreme modesty. It was 

 under these circumstances that iu 1743 Graudjean de Fouchy becam^e 

 the official organ of the old Academy. 



Fouchy had occupied this position for more than thirty years when 

 Condorcet entered the learned company. The infirmities of the perpet- 

 ual secretary and his age made him desirous of a collaborator, and for 

 this purpose he cast his eyes upon his j^oungest confrere. This was to 

 create survivorship, to establish a precedent, and produced violent oppo- 

 sition iu the Academy. 



After an excitement rarely caused by the discussion of an abstract 

 principle, the question finally stood as follows: ThesuccessorofFontenelle, 

 shall it be Bailly or Condorcet ? The struggle could not fail to be noble 

 and loyal in all that concerned these two gentlemen. Condorcet, through- 

 out his life modest in the extreme, thought it necessary to give some 

 evidence of his fitness for the place, of his facility in the art of writing, 

 and undertook to compose some academic eulogies. The regulation of 

 1G99 imposed upou the perpetual secretary the obligation of paying a 

 tribute of respect to the memory of the academiciiins reirioved by death. 

 This is the origin of the numerous biogiaphies, olten eloquent, always 

 ingenious, left by Fontenelle, and confined all of them to the interval 

 comprised between the last year of the XVIIth century and 1740. Fon- 

 tenelle in his annals of the society does not take up the past, but com- 

 mences only with the time of his entrance into ofitice. The admirable 

 collection he has left us, therefore, leaves a gap of thirty-three years. 

 The academicians, deceased between 1G66 and 1G99, had no biographer, 

 and it is iu this third of a century that Condorcet found the subjects for 

 the exercise ot his pen, and among them such savans as Huygens, 

 Eoberval, Picard, Mariotte, Pcrrault, Roemer, &c. These, his first eulo- 

 gies, are written with a profound knowledge of the subjects treated by 

 the academicians, and in a simple, clear, and concise style. Condorcet 

 said, in sending them to Turgot, "If I were able to give them more 

 brilliancy of expression they would be more pleasing, but nature has 

 not endowed me with the gift of such union of words. If 1 attempt any- 

 thing of the kind, one word, astonished at another, starts back iu affright 

 to see itself so associated. I am humiliated belore those whom in this 

 resi)ect nature has treated so much better than myself." Condorcet was 

 mistaken iu his low estimate of work which procured for him a large 

 majority in the Academy, and of which Voltaire, d'Alembert, and La- 

 grange always spoke with great esteem. On the 9lh of April, 1773, 

 d'Alembert wrote to Lagrange, "Condorcet merited well the place of 

 secretary on account of the excellent eulogies he has j)ublished of the 

 S. Mis. 59 13 



