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 wherever there is any good to be done, or sound advice to be given; mine is to remain at home.”  This rare retiring and respectable conduct did not disarm some hideous pamphleteers.  Their impudent sarcasms were continually attacking the modest wife on her domestic hearth, and troubling her peace of mind.  In their logic of the tavern they fancied that an elegant and handsome woman, who avoided society, could not fail to be ignorant and stupid.  Thence arose a thousand imaginary stories, ridiculous both as to their matter and form, thrown out daily to the public, more, indeed, to offend and disgust the upright magistrate than to humble his companion.

The axe that ended our colleague’s life, with the same stroke, and almost as completely, crushed in Madame Bailly, after so many poignant agitations and unexampled misfortunes, all that was left of strength of mind and power of intellect.  A strange incident also aggravated the sadness of Madame Bailly’s situation.  On a day of trouble, during her husband’s lifetime, she had placed the assignats resulting from the sale of their house at Chaillot, amounting to about thirty thousand francs, in the wadding of a dress.  The enfeebled memory of the unfortunate widow did not recall to her the existence of this treasure, even in the time of her greatest distress.  When the age of the material which had secreted them began to reveal them to daylight, they were no longer of any value.

The widow of the author of one of the best works of the age, of the learned member of our three great academies, of the first President of the National Assembly, of the first Mayor of Paris, found herself thus reduced, by an unheard-of turn of fortune, to implore help from public pity.  It was the geometer Cousin, member of this academy, who by his incessant solicitations got Madame Bailly’s name inserted at the Board of Charity in his arrondissement.  The support was distributed in kind.  Cousin used to receive the articles at the Hotel de Ville, where he was a Municipal Councillor, and carried them himself to the street de la Sourdiere.  It was, in short, in the street de la Sourdiere that Madame Bailly had