f 
218 BAILLY. 
They hoped to live there in peace ; but news from Paris 
soon dissipated this illusion. The Council of the Com- 
mune decreed, that the house previously occupied, in 
consequence of a formal decision, by the Mayor of Paris, 
and by the public offices of the town, ought to have paid 
a tax of 6,000 livres, and strange enough, that Bailly 
was responsible for it. The pretended debt was claimed 
with harshness. ‘They demanded the payment of it 
without delay. To free himself Bailly was obliged to 
sell his library, to abandon to the chances of an auction 
that multitude of valuable books, from which he had 
sought out, in the silence of his study, and with such 
remarkable perseverance, the most recondite secrets of 
the firmament. 
This painful separation was followed by two acts that 
did not afflict him less. 
The central government (then directed, it must be 
allowed, by the Gironde party) placed Bailly under sur- 
veillance. Every eight days the venerable academician 
was obliged to present himself at the house of the Syndic 
Procurator of the Departmental Administration of the 
Lower-Loire, like a vile malefactor, whose every footstep 
it would be to the interest of society to watch. What 
was the true motive for such a strange measure? This 
secret has been buried in a tomb where [I shall not a 
myself to dig for it. 
Though painful to me to say so, the odious assimilation 
of Bailly to a dangerous criminal had not exhausted the 
rancour of his enemies. A letter from Roland, the Min- 
ister of the Interior, announced very dryly to the unfor- 
tunate proscribed man, that the apartments in the Louvre, 
which his family had occupied for upwards of half a 
century, had been withdrawn from him. They had even 
