e Rue Servandoni was left on the latch night
and day for a whole week. But Madame Vernet's generous hope was in vain;
while she still hoped and watched, the end had come. On the evening of
the seventh, Condorcet, with one of his legs torn or broken, his
garments in rags, with visage gaunt and hunger-stricken, entered an inn
in the hamlet of Clamart, and called for an omelette. Asked how many
eggs he would have in it, the famishing man answered a dozen.
Carpenters, for such he had given himself to be, do not have a dozen
eggs in their omelettes. Suspicion was aroused, his hands were not the
hands of a workman, and he had no papers to show, but only the pocket
Horace. The villagers seized him and hastened to drag him, bound hand
and foot, to Bourg-la-Reine, then called for a season Bourg-l'Egalite.
On the road he fainted, and they set him on a horse offered by a pitying
wayfarer. When they reached the prison, Condorcet, starving, bleeding,
way-worn, was flung into his cell. On the morrow, when the gaolers came
to seek him, they found him stretched upon the ground, dead and stark.
So he perished--of hunger and weariness, say some; of poison ever
carried by him in a ring, say others.[39] So, to the last revolving
supreme cares, this high spirit was overtaken by annihilation. His
memory is left to us, the fruit of his ideas, and the impression of his
character.

* * * * *

An eminent man, who escaped by one accident from the hatchets of the
Septembriseurs, and by another from the guillotine of the Terror, while
in hiding and in momentary expectation of capture and death, wrote thus
in condemnation of suicide, 'the one crime which leaves no possibility
of return to virtue.' 'Even at this incomprehensible moment'--the spring
of 1793--'when morality, enlightenment, energetic love of country, only
render death at the prison-wicket or on the scaffold more inevitable;
when it might be allowable to choose among the ways of leaving a life
that can no longer be preserved, and to rob tigers in human form of the
accursed pleasure of dragging you forth and drinking your blood; yes, on
the fatal tumbril itself, with nothing free but voice, I could still
cry, _Take care_, to a child that should come too near the wheel:
perhaps he may owe his life to me, perhaps the country shall one day owe
its salvation to him.'[40]

More than one career in those days, famous or obscure, was marked by
this noble tenacity to loft