I, as a matter of course, looked upon him and his books in the same light, and it was only when my ideas upon philosophy were well consolidated that I came to understand that I had been fortunate enough during my youth to contemplate a truly wise man.  I had no difficulty in reconstructing his ideas by piecing together a few words which at the time had appeared to me unintelligible, but which I had remembered.  God, in his eyes, was the order of nature, from which all things proceed, and he would not brook contradiction upon this point.  He loved humanity as representing reason, and he hated superstition as the negation of reason.  Although he had not the poetic afflatus which the nineteenth century has given to these great truths, System, I feel sure, had very high and far-reaching views.  He was quite in the right.  So far from failing to appreciate the greatness of God, he looked with contempt upon those who believed that they could move Him.  Lost in profound tranquillity and unaffected humility, he saw that human error was more to be pitied than hated.  It was evident that he despised his age.  The revival of superstition, which, he thought, had been buried by Voltaire and Rousseau, seemed to him a sign of utter imbecility in the rising generation.

He was found dead one morning in his humble room, with his books and papers littered all about him.  This was soon after the Revolution of 1830, and the mayor had him decently interred at night.  The clergy purchased the whole of his library at a nominal price and made away with it.  No papers were found which served to elucidate the mystery which had always surrounded him, but in the corner of one drawer was found a packet containing some faded flowers tied up with a tricoloured ribbon.  At first this was supposed to be some love-token, and several people built upon this foundation a romantic biography of the deceased recluse, but the tricolour ribbon tended to discredit this version.  My mother never believed that it was the correct one.  Although she had an instinctive feeling of respect for System, she always said to me:  “I am sure that he was one of the Terrorists.  I sometimes fancy that I remember seeing him in 1793.  Besides, he has all the ways and ideas of M——­, who terrorised Lannion and kept the guillotine in constant play there during the time that Robespierre had the upper hand.”  Fifteen or twenty years ago, I read the following paragraph in a newspaper: 

“There died yesterday, almost suddenly, in an unfrequented street of the Faubourg St. Jacques, an old man whose way of living was a constant source of gossip in the neighbourhood.  He was respected in the parish as a model of charity and kindness, but he was careful to avoid any allusion to his past.  A few works, such as Volney’s Catechism, and odd volumes of Rousseau, were scattered about the table.  All his property consisted of a trunk, which, when opened by the Commissary of Police, was found to contain only a few clothes and a faded bouquet carefully wrapped up in a piece of paper on which was written:  ’Bouquet which I wore at the festival of the Supreme Being, 20 Prairial, year II.’”