HIS WIFE. 255 
Academician, and they have not been profaned by an 
admixture of any others, more worldly and more osten- 
“tatious.” 
Bailly married, in November, 1787, an intimate friend 
a of his mother’s, already a widow, only two years younger 
than himself. Madame Bailly, a distant relation of the 
author of the Marseillaise, had an attachment for her 
husband that bordered on adoration. She lavished on 
him the most tender and affectionate attention. The 
success that Madame Bailly might have had in the fash- 
ionable world by her beauty, her grace, by her ineffable 
goodness, did not tempt her. She lived in almost abso- 
lute retirement, even when the learned academician was 
most in society. ‘The Mayor’s wife appeared only at 
one public ceremony: the day of the benediction of the 
colours of the sixty battalions of the National Guard by 
the Archbishop of Paris, she accompanied Madame de 
Lafayette to the Cathedral. She said: “ My husband’s 
duty is to show himself in public wherever there is any 
good to be done, or sound advice to be given; mine is to 
remain at home.” ‘This rare retiring and respectable 
conduct did not disarm some hideous pamphleteers. 
Their impudent sarcasms were continually attacking the 
modest wife on her domestic hearth, and troubling her 
peace of mind. In their logic of the tavern they fancied 
that an elegant and handsome woman, who avoided soci- 
ety, could not fail to be ignorant and stupid. Thence 
arose a thousand imaginary stories, ridiculous both as to 
their matter and form, thrown out daily to the public, 
more, indeed, to offend and disgust the upright magis- 
trate than to humble his companion. 
The axe that ended our colleague’s life, with the same 
stroke, and almost as completely, crushed in Madame 
