been wanting in the picture,
if Bailly had taken the trouble to remark how strange it was, that these
violent scruples against repeated Communions emanated from persons who
probably never took the Sacrament at all.

The reports on animal magnetism, on the hospitals, on the
slaughter-houses, had carried Bailly's name into regions, whence the
courtiers knew very cleverly how to discard true merit. _Madame_ then
wished to attach the illustrious academician to her person as a cabinet
secretary. Bailly accepted. It was an entirely honorary title. The
secretary saw the princess only once, that was on the day of his
presentation.

Were more important functions reserved for him? We must suppose so; for
some influential persons offered to procure Bailly a title of nobility
and a decoration. This time the philosopher flatly refused, saying, in
answer to the earnest negotiators: "I thank you, but he who has the
honour of belonging to the three principal academies of France is
sufficiently decorated, sufficiently noble in the eyes of rational men;
a cordon, or a title, could add nothing to him."

The first secretary of the Academy of Sciences had, some years before,
acted as Bailly did. Only he gave his refusal in such strong terms, that
I could not easily believe them to have been written by the timid pen of
Fontenelle, if I did not find them in a perfectly authentic document, in
which he says: "Of all the titles in this world, I have never had any
but of one sort, the titles of Academician, and they have not been
profaned by an admixture of any others, more worldly and more
ostentatious."

Bailly married, in November, 1787, an intimate friend of his mother's,
already a widow, only two years younger than himself. Madame Bailly, a
distant relation of the author of the _Marseillaise_, had an attachment
for her husband that bordered on adoration. She lavished on him the most
tender and affectionate attention. The success that Madame Bailly might
have had in the fashionable world by her beauty, her grace, by her
ineffable goodness, did not tempt her. She lived in almost absolute
retirement, even when the learned academician was most in society. The
Mayor's wife appeared only at one public ceremony: the day of the
benediction of the colours of the sixty battalions of the National Guard
by the Archbishop of Paris, she accompanied Madame de Lafayette to the
Cathedral. She said: "My husband's duty is to show himself in public
wherev