ividual who, from not believing that a loaded barge could get
up to Poissy, was going, on the 21st August, 1789, to plunge the capital
into bloody disorders.

By means of perseverance, devotedness, and courage, Bailly succeeded in
overcoming all the difficulties that the real scarcity, and the
fictitious one, which was still more redoubtable, caused daily to arise.
He succeeded, but his health from that epoch was deeply injured; his
mind had undergone several of those severe shocks that we can never
entirely recover from. Our colleague said, "when I used to pass the
bakers' shops during the scarcity, and saw them besieged by a crowd, my
heart sunk within me; and even now that abundance has been restored to
us, the sight of one of those shops strikes me with a deep emotion."

The administrative conflicts, the source of which lay in the very bosom
of the Council of the Commune, daily drew from Bailly the following
exclamation, a faithful image of his mind: _I have ceased to be happy_.
The embarrassments that proceeded from external sources touched him
much less, and yet they were far from contemptible. Let us surmount our
repugnance, although a reasonable one; let us cast a firm look on the
sink where the unworthy calumnies were manufactured, of which Bailly was
for some time the object.

Several years before our first revolution, a native of Neufchatel
quitted his mountains, traversed the Jura, and lighted upon Paris.
Without means, without any recognized talent, without eminence of any
sort, repulsive in appearance, of a more than negligent deportment, it
seemed unlikely that he should hope, or even dream, of success; but the
young traveller had been told to have full confidence, although a
celebrated academician had not yet given that singular definition of our
country, "France is the home of foreigners." At all events, the
definition was not erroneous in this instance, for soon after his
arrival, the Neufchatelois was appointed physician to the household of
one of the princes of the royal family, and formed strict intimacies
with the greater part of the powerful people about the court.

This stranger thirsted for literary glory. Amongst his early
productions, a medico-philosophical work figured in three volumes,
relative to the reciprocal influences of the mind and the body. The
author thought he had produced a _chef d'oeuvre_; even Voltaire was
not thought to be above analyzing it suitably; let us hasten to say th