4 Biographical Memoir of M. Halle. 



not lived without benefit to others. His practice had gradually 

 extended, but it was of a singular kind. The easy circum- 

 stances which his family had long enjoyed, allowed him to visit, 

 by preference, the sick poor ; and this he did assiduously. He 

 aided them by his gifts as much as by his advice ; and, inge- 

 nious in his charity, concealed his bounty from those by whom, 

 from delicacy, it would not have been accepted. More than 

 one person in distress, on recovering from sickness, found all his 

 expenses paid, and learned, only by importunate inquiry, that 

 every thing had been provided by his physician. His charity 

 gained a great reward, and that which best suited him, the 

 ability still to exercise it at the period when it became most 

 necessary. His father and grandfather had received the ribbon 

 of St Michael, and the ennoblement that always accompanied 

 admission into the order, brought him under the decree of 

 banishment, when the Convention commanded the nobles to 

 leave Paris ; but, as the physician of the poor, he was excepted 

 from the rule ; and he had then another kind of calamity to re- 

 lieve. To avert dangers that threatened every one, and, when 

 it was possible, to provide the means of escaping them, became 

 in his eyes duties not less sacred than those of his profession. 

 He penetrated into the prison of Malesherbes, brought him con- 

 solation, and received his last farewell. He drew up, at the 

 Lyceum of Arts, the petition soliciting the pardon of Lavoisier. 

 A thousand other services, where the chief condition was secrecy, 

 but which time has in part revealed, occupied him during these 

 two years, which were ages of misery and disgrace. 



At length the period arrived when M. Halle was called to 

 teach, aiid to advance, by his writings, the art to which he had 

 devoted himself. Fourcroy, entrusted, in 1794 and 1795, 

 with the establishment of a school of medicine, conferred on 

 him the chair of Medical Physics and Health. Not long after, 

 in 1796, whrn the Institute was formed, he was named a mem- 

 ber of the Section of Medicine and Surgery ; and, in 1806, 

 Corvisart, fully occupied with his duties near the chief of the 

 government, selected him as his coadjutor in his chair at the 

 College of France, and soon left it to him entirely. 



At the Institute, M. Halle shewed himself not less active 

 than he had been before at the Society of Medicine, Among 



