On the morning of April 8, 1794, when the jailor of the prison of Bourg-la-Reine came to hand over the new prisoner to the _gendarmes_ who had arrived to take him to Paris, the Marquis de Condorcet was found dead in his cell. With a powerful preparation of opium and stramonium prepared by his friend Cabanis, the celebrated physician, and which Condorcet had long carried about with him in his ring, he had ‘cheated the guillotine.’ It was remembered afterwards, that when he left the Suards’ house, he had turned saying, ‘If I have one night before me, I fear no man; but I will not be taken to Paris.’ That he who gave his life to the people should have defrauded them, as it were, of his death, strikes the one discord in the clear harmony of this true soul. Better that a Condorcet, like many a lesser man, should have mounted the guillotine as a king mounts his throne, proud to die for the cause for which he had lived, and hearing through the blasphemy and the execrations of the rabble below, the far-off music of a free and happy people. For many months the woman who loved him had no news of his death. She hoped against hope that he had escaped, and was in safety in Switzerland. To support her little household she took a fine-linen shop in the Rue St. Honoré, and in the _entresol_ set up her little studio where she continued her portrait-painting. In January, 1794, for the good and safety of their child, she had heroically petitioned the municipality for a divorce from her husband, and obtained it--six weeks after his death. When the certain news of that death reached her, both her health and her strong heart faltered. But Doctor Cabanis, who afterwards married her young sister, saved her--for further effort and longer work. Full of courage and resignation she rose up again, wrote a preface to ‘The Progress of the Human Mind,’ educated her child, and when in 1795 some of her fortune was restored, immediately began paying the pensions which d’Alembert had asked Condorcet to give his old servants. In later days she had a little _salon_ in Paris, saw her daughter happily married, and died in 1822. In every stupendous change which France experienced between the fall of Robespierre and the death of Napoleon Bonaparte, she remained faithful to the principles to which her husband had devoted his genius and his life. Through all, the Marquise de Condorcet had been, and had counted herself, a happy woman. Wrung with such sorrows as do not fall to the lot of many of her sex, she had had a blessing which is the portion of far fewer of them; she had inspired a great devotion, and had been worthy of it. To Condorcet is meted now in some sort the same judgment as was meted to him in life.