" And such a nature! One of these,
Trenchard, an Auvergnat carpenter, portrays himself accurately in the
following note addressed to his wife before the trial comes on:
"If you are not alone, and the companion can work, you may come, my
dear, and see the twenty-four gentlemen condemned, all of them former
presidents or councillors in the parliaments of Toulouse and Paris. I
recommend you to bring something along with you (to eat), it will be
three hours before we finish. I embrace you, my dear friend and
wife."[156]
In the same court, Lavoisier, the founder and organizer of chemistry,
the great discoverer, and condemned to death, asks for a reprieve of
his sentence for a fortnight to complete an experiment, and the
president, Coffinhal, another Auvergnat, replies,
"The Republic has no need of savants."[157]
And it has no need of poets. The first poet of the epoch, Andr?
Ch?nier, the delicate and superior artist who reopens antique sources
of inspiration and starts the modern current, is guillotined; we
possess the original manuscript indictment of his examination, a
veritable master-piece of gibberish and barbarism, of which a full
copy is necessary to convey an idea of its "turpitudes of sense and
orthography.
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