Minoret knew Robespierre intimately, for he had once been instrumental
in awarding him a gold medal for a dissertation on the following
subject: "What is the origin of the opinion that covers a whole family
with the shame attaching to the public punishment of a guilty member
of it? Is that opinion more harmful than useful? If yes, in what way
can the harm be warded off." The Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences at
Metz, to which Minoret belonged, must possess this dissertation in the
original. Though, thanks to this friendship, the Doctor's wife need
have had no fear, she was so in dread of going to the scaffold that
her terror increased a disposition to heart disease caused by the
over-sensitiveness of her nature. In spite of all the precautions
taken by the man who idolized her, Ursula unfortunately met the
tumbril of victims among whom was Madame Roland, and the shock caused
her death. Minoret, who in tenderness to his wife had refused her
nothing, and had given her a life of luxury, found himself after her
death almost a poor man. Robespierre gave him an appointment as
surgeon-in-charge of a hospital.

Though the name of Minoret obtained during the lively debates to which
mesmerism gave rise a certain celebrity which occasionally recalled
him to the minds of his relatives, still the Revolution was so great a
destroyer of family relations that in 1813 Nemours knew little of
Doctor Minoret, who was induced to think of returning there to die,
like the hare to its form, by a circumstance that was wholly
accidental.

Who has not felt in traveling through France, where the eye is often
wearied by the monotony of plains, the charming sensation of coming
suddenly, when the eye is prepared for a barren landscape, upon a
fresh cool valley, watered by a river, with a little town sheltering