the misfortune to strike upon a rock? For, in offering to M. Chénier this tribute of respect which is due to all the dead, I fear to meet beneath my steps ashes very differently illustrious. If ungenerous interpretations would impute this involuntary emotion to me as a crime, I should take refuge at the foot of those expiatory altars which a powerful monarch erects to the manes of outraged dynasties. Ah, how much happier would it have been for M. Chénier not to have taken part in those public calamities which at last fell back upon his head! He has known, like myself, what it means to lose in the storms a fondly cherished brother[70]. What would our unhappy brothers have said, had God summoned them on the same day before His tribunal? If they had met at the hour of death, before mingling their blood they would doubtless have cried to us, 'Cease your intestine wars, return to thoughts of love and peace; death strikes all parties alike, and your cruel divisions cost us our youth and our life.' That would have been their fraternal cry. [Sidenote: My speech continued.] "If my predecessor could hear these words, which now console only his shade, he would appreciate the tribute which I am here paying to his brother, for he was by nature generous: it was even this generosity of character which drew him into new ideas, very seductive no doubt, since they promised to restore to us the virtues of Fabricius[71]. But, soon deceived in his hopes, he found his mood becoming embittered, his talent changing its nature. Removed from the poet's solitude into the midst of factions, how could he have abandoned himself to those sentiments which make the charm of life? Happy had he seen no sky save the sky of Greece under which he was born[72], had he set eyes upon no ruins save those of Sparta and Athens! I should perhaps have met him in his mother's beautiful country, and we would have sworn mutual friendship on the banks of the Permessus; or else, since he was to return to his paternal fields, why did he not follow me to the deserts upon which I was flung by our tempests! The silence of the forests would have calmed that troubled soul, and the huts of the savages would perhaps have reconciled him to the palaces of kings. Vain wish! M. Chénier remained upon the stage of our excitements and our sorrows. Attacked while still in his youth by a mortal malady, you have seen him, gentlemen, droop slowly towards the tomb and leave for ever.... I have not been told of his last moments.