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 Konigstein, to contribute as a 

 hero to the long defence of Mayence, and met his death, 

 at the age of forty years only, after having j ttained 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 was to 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 



