ii Personal Traits of Desmarest 77 



A character so little affected by external things was 

 naturally immovable in regard to relations and habits. 

 From the earliest days when he began to be known, he had 

 been engaged to pass his Sundays at Auteuil with a friend. 

 Ever afterwards he would appear there on the usual day, 

 even when his friend was dead, and when age no longer 

 allowed him to enjoy the country ; and as he had from the 

 first gone on foot, he always went there on foot until he 

 was eighty-five years old. All that his family could then 

 prevail upon him to do was to take a carriage. 



Nor was he less constant in more trivial affairs. Never 

 did he dine or go to bed later one day than another. No- 

 body remembered ever to have seen him change the cut of 

 his clothes, and down to his last days his wig and his coat 

 recalled the fashions in vogue under the Cardinal de Fleury. 



After recalling his kindliness and helpfulness to poor 

 inventors, for whom he ever evinced the heartiest sympathy, 

 his biographer concludes in eloquent words, with which I 

 may fitly close this sketch of Desmarest's career. " The 

 Academy of Sciences saw in him, as it were, the monument 

 of a bygone age, one of those old philosophers, now too 

 few, who occupied only with science, did not waste them- 

 selves in the ambitions of the world, nor in rambling 

 through too wide a range of study, men more envied than 

 imitated, who have supplied us with that succession of 

 octogenarians and nonagenarians, of which our history is 

 full. Living like these worthies, Desmarest fulfilled a 

 similar career, and reached without infirmities or any grave 

 malady the age of ninety years. He died on the 20th 

 September 1815. 



" During his protracted lifetime he saw the Academy 



