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 

 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 



' o 



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 



