104 CARNOT. 
PORTRAIT OF CARNOT.—ANECDOTES RELATIVE TO HIS 
POLITICAL AND PRIVATE LIFE. 
If iconography is not now considered by anybody as a 
futile science, if some very distinguished minds have 
made it the object of their éarnest study, it may be per- 
mitted me here to say, that Carnot was of tall stature, of 
manly and regular features, a wide and calm forehead, 
lively and penetrating blue eyes, a polite demeanour, 
but circumspect and cold; that at the age of sixty, there 
was still perceptible in him, even in a civilian’s costume, 
something of the military air to which he had been 
accustomed in his youth. 
I have considered him in all his phases,—as a mem- 
ber of the Conventional Government, of the Committee 
of Public Safety, of the Executive Directory, the Min- 
ister of War, a Military Engineer, the Exile, the Acade- 
mician. Still, many essential traits would be wanting to 
the portrait, however comprehensive it be already, if I 
did not also speak of the private man. I shall not 
swerve, in this latter portion of my picture, from the 
style that I adopted in the beginning; I shall advance 
always proof in hand. It is thus I think that a geometer 
should be praised; I mistake, it is thus that everybody 
should be praised; seeing how rare honour, disinterest- 
edness, and true patriotism are among the living; and 
how common, on the contrary, among the dead, accord- . 
ing to their funeral eulogies and their epitaphs; the 
public has come to the wise conclusion of no longer 
believing either the one or the other. 
I have read somewhere that Carnot was an ambitious 
man. I will not stop to combat this opinion in form, 
but I will relate, and you yourselves shall judge. 
