personage chose faubourg Saint Marceau for a place of residence, he 
thought to avail himself of the package as a means of making his 
acquaintance. Rue des Charbonnier is a little street in what was then 
the poorer district of Paris, No. 2 a tenement house. Having been 
directed to the sixth story by a “merchant of wine”* and having 
climbed what seemed to him an interminable, badf stairway he 
knocked on the door indicated. It was cautiously opened a few 
inches, a shabbily dressed individual demanded his business, and 
finally admitted him to the lodgings. It was a little room under 
the roof. I badly lighted but too well ventilated by numerous 
cracks around windows and doors, and although it was winter 
there was no fire. A bed and a chair or two, some rough 
tables covered with packages of plants, books and specimens—such 
were the surroundings in which this genius worked. The bookseller 
wishing to flatter him addressed him by the title on the package as 
“My Prince”, but Persoon thinking he was making sport angrily ex¬ 
claimed “Yes Prince, and here are my subjects. There are some dried 
between sheets of paper and here are some preserved in alcohol. There 
are some who will be poisoned with corrosive sublimate, and others 
who await a burning fire. Instead of saying “Prince” you had better 
say “Tyrant”, and a tyrant more terrible than Denis, because at 
Syracuse it at least was warm, and I freeze at Paris.” So saying he 
pushed his visitor to the door, and he, thoroughly alarmed at the strange 
interior, beat a hasty retreat.” Fee (1825) found Persoon in the same 
reduced and humiliating position. He interested himself to ameliorate 
his condition and solicited the aid of some wealthy friends. Persoon 
rejected the project stating, “The sentiments of dignity which have 
always served as a rule for my conduct should exist with all men of 
science. It would displease me to receive aid in any manner which 
. later might cause me shame for having accepted it. The fact might 
be distorted to depreciate a man whose name is cited in the scientific 
world, and I would remain disconsolate.” Shortly after this Fee made 
the acquaintance of a man in close relation with the Prince of Orange of 
Holland, and as Persoon was really a Dutch subject, having been born 
in a Dutch colony, the government of Holland was solicited to acquire 
the herbarium in lieu of an annual pension of eight hundred florins 
(about three hundred and fifty dollars). “Monsieur Fagel, then 
ambassador at Paris, visited the herbarium and placed seals on the 
boxes and packages as a sign of having taken possession. Poor Per¬ 
soon was humiliated at this operation but he dare not complain.” 
The herbarium was shipped to Leyden, but Persoon continued to live 
at Paris, in affluence compared to his previous existence, until his 
death. February IT, 1887. “He died in isolation. The hand that 
closed his eyes was that of a stranger, and no friend was at his death 
bed to mourn for him. The botanists at Paris were perhaps ignorant 
* As the Parisians call their saloon keepers. 
f We can not use the ordinary English word “rickety” applied to bad stairways, for here 
they are usually made of stone, and however bad the}' may be they are not rickety. 
t The same house stilll remains near the Gare de Lyon. It appears from the outside like 
ten thousand other houses in Paris, for all are built on the same plan. It is five stories with a 
mansarde like all houses, and in this “mansarde” (garret we would call it) Persoon lived I 
have made inquiries of the '‘concierge”, but no tradition even of Persoon is known in that 
neighborhood. 
159 
