LAVOISIER. 41 



latter, so soon as he became acquainted with this circumstance, 

 determined to surrender at once, lest his absence might give 

 colour to the charge against him and his father-in-law, and 

 lest the latter might be unduly prejudiced. 



Revealing the place of his concealment, Lavoisier was 

 seized by the triumvirate, along with twenty-seven others, 

 all of whom had been Fermiers-General before the revolu- 

 tion. A great cry was now being made against the peculation 

 of these same officials ; and notwithstanding the office had 

 been abolished by the revolution, and that none but an un- 

 principled tyrant would have judged people for retrospective 

 offences in a case like this, Robespierre was not a man to be 

 restrained by such scruples. The Fermiers-General were 

 rich ; that was enough. 



So Lavoisier was sent to prison, in company with the 

 other twenty-seven. He was brought to a mock trial, and 

 condemned ; but the frivolous charge on which he was to die 

 proclaims, better than a whole treatise, the integrity of his 

 previous life. If the reader of this can divest himself of the 

 knowledge for one moment of the fact that the axe of the 

 guillotine is poised aloft, waiting for a victim ; if he can drive 

 out from the recesses of memory recollections of this fearful 

 time, and carry himself ideally back into the council- chamber 

 of the horrid triumvirate, where the nature of Lavoisier's 

 derelictions were gravely set forth, he may indulge a passing 

 smile. Fancy a man, retired from business many years, 

 gravely brought to trial in Westminster Hall for having 

 watered his tobacco and snuff some ten years ago ! Yet so it 

 was ; no graver charge could be brought against Lavoisier 

 by those who, depend upon it, said the worst they could 

 about him. For this he died, on the 8th of May 1794. 



It was dangerous to stand up and speak well of a man in 

 those days ; nevertheless, the citizen Halle did so. He boldly 

 impugned the right of trying a man on a retrospective charge; 

 but he did it unavailingly. He then, when the trial was 



