, and rarely missed a meeting of the
scientific section of the Academie, of which he was a member. What
attracted him most, however, was astronomy; next to that came entomology
and botany. Still, though an enthusiast, and often risking a cold to
observe an astral phenomenon, he objected to wasting thousands of pounds
for a similar purpose; in fact, when it came to disbursing government
money for a scientific or other vaguely defined purpose, his economic
tendencies got the better of him. "I am a very interesting scientific
phenomenon myself," he used to say, "or, at any rate, I was; and yet no
one spent any money to come and see me."

He was alluding to a fact which he often told me himself, and afterwards
narrated in his "memoirs."

"For a long while, especially from 1818 to 1830, when the weather
happened to be very dry and cold, and when I returned to my grateless,
humble room, after having spent the day in heated apartments, I was both
the spectator and the medium of strange electrical phenomena.

"The moment I had undressed and stood in my shirt, the latter began to
crackle and became absolutely luminous, emitting a lot of sparks; the
tails stuck together, and remained like that for some time."

I asked him, on one occasion, whether he had ever communicated all this
to scientific authorities. His answer, though not a direct one to my
question, was not only very characteristic of the mental and moral
attitude of the soldiers of the Empire towards the Bourbons, but, to a
great extent, of the attitude of the Bourbons themselves towards
everybody and everything that was not absolutely in accordance with the
policy, sociology, and religious tenets of their adherents, whether
laymen or priests.

"You must remember, my dear fellow," he replied, "the regime under which
we lived when I was subject to those electrical manifestations; you must
further remember that I had fought at Ligny and at Waterloo, and, though
not absolutely put on the retired list in 1815, I and the rest of the
Emperor's soldiers were watched, and our most innocent acts construed
into so many small attempts at conspiracy. You have not the slightest
idea what the police were like under the Restauration, let alone the
priesthood. If I couple these two, I am not speaking at random. If I had
communicated the things I told you of, to no matter what savant, he
would necessarily have published the result of his observations and
experiments, and do you kno