376 JOSEPH FOURIER. 
to suppose, we were deprived of. At the voice of his 
country in danger, another academician, the young and 
learned Meunier, readily renounced the seductive pur- 
suits of the laboratory; he went to distinguish himself 
upon the ramparts of K6nigstein, to contribute as a 
hero to the long defence of Mayence, and met his death, 
at the age of forty years only, after having attained the 
highest position in a garrison wherein shone the Aubert- 
Dubayets, the Beaupuys, the Haxos, the Klebers. 
How could I forget here the last secretary of the 
original Academy? Follow him into a celebrated As- 
sembly, into that Convention, the sanguinary delirium of 
which we might almost be inclined to pardon, when we 
call to mind how gloriously terrible it wa the ene- 
mies of our independence, and you will always see the 
illustrious Condorcet occupied exclusively with the great 
interests of reason and humanity. You will hear him 
denounce the shameful brigandage which for two centu- 
ries laid waste the African continent by a system of cor- 
ruption; demand in a tone of profound conviction that 
the Code be purified of the frightful stain of capital 
punishment, which renders the error of the judge for 
ever irreparable. He is the official organ of the As- 
sembly on every occasion when it is necessary to address 
soldiers, citizens, political parties, or foreign nations in 
language worthy of France ; he is not the tactician of any 
party, he incessantly entreats all of them to occupy their 
attention less with their own interests and a little more 
with public matters; he replies, finally, to unjust re- 
proaches of weakness by acts which leave him the only 
alternative of the poison cup or the scaffold. 
The French Revolution thus threw the learned geom- 
eter, whose discoveries I am about to celebrate, far away 
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