I will quote some words which, while testifying to a similar degree Bailly’s serenity of mind, are more in harmony with his grave character, and more worthy of being preserved in history.

One of the companions of the illustrious academician’s captivity, on the evening of the 11th of November, with tears in his eyes and moved by a tender veneration, exclaimed:  “Why did you let us fancy there was a possibility of acquittal?  You deceived us then?”—­Bailly answered:  “No, I was teaching you never to despair of the laws of your country.”

In the paroxysms of wild despair, some of the prisoners reviewing the past, went so far as to regret that they had never infringed the laws of the strictest honesty.

Bailly brought back these minds, erring for the moment from the path of duty, by repeating to them maxims which both in form and substance would not disparage the collections of the most celebrated moralists: 

“It is false, very false, that a crime can ever be useful.  The trade of an honest man is the safest, even in times of revolution.  Enlightened egotism suffices to put any intelligent individual into the path of justice and truth.  Whenever innocence can be sacrificed with impunity, crime is not sure of succeeding.  There is so great a difference between the death of a good man and that of a wicked man, that the multitude is incapable of estimating it.”

Cannibals devouring their vanquished enemies seem to me less hideous, less contrary to nature, than those wretches, the refuse of the population of large towns, who, too often alas! have carried their ferocity so far, as to disturb by their clamorous and infamous raillery the last moments of the unhappy victims about to be struck by the sword of the law.  The more humiliating this picture of the degradation of the human species may be, the more we should beware of overcharging the colouring.  With few exceptions, the historians of Bailly’s last agony appear to me to have forgotten this duty.  Was the truth, the strict truth, not sufficiently distressing?  Was it requisite, without any sort of proof, to impute to the mass of the people the infernal cynicism of cannibals?  Should they lightly make just sentiments of disgust and indignation rest upon an immense class of citizens?  I think not, Gentlemen, and I will therefore avoid the cruelty and poignancy of chaining the thoughts for a long time on such scenes; I will prove that by rendering the drama a little less atrocious, I have only sacrificed imaginary details, which are the envenomed fruits of the spirit of the party.

I will not shut my ears to the questions that already hum around me.  People will say to me, What are your claims for daring to modify a page of our revolutionary history, on which every one seemed agreed?  What right have you to weaken contemporary testimonies, you, who at the time of Bailly’s death, were scarcely born; you, who lived in an obscure valley of the Pyrenees, two hundred and twenty leagues from the capital?