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 allow 

 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 century, had been withdrawn from him.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 



