Capturing the Center

   In the next article, I will discuss in very great detail these opinions,
   which really belong more to Mr. Monge than to myself: But it is
   indispensable that I first establish, in a solid way, the observations on
   which they are based.

I don't know why Lavoisier's execution during the Reign of Terror in 1794 affects me so deeply. We cannot be confident that he would have completed his geological projects if he had lived (for all creative careers must remain chock-full of unrealized plans); and we know that he faced his end with a dignity and equanimity that can still provide comfort across the centuries. He wrote in a last letter:

   I have had a fairly long life, above all a very happy one, and I think that
   I shall be remembered with some regrets and perhaps leave some reputation
   behind me. What more could I ask? The events in which I am involved will
   probably save me from the troubles of old age. I shall die in full
   possession of my faculties.

Lavoisier needs no rescue, either from me or from any modern author. Yet, speaking personally (a happy privilege granted to essayists ever since Montaigne invented the genre for this explicit purpose more than 200 years before Lavoisier's time), I do long for some visceral sense of fellowship with this man who stands next to Darwin in my private intellectual pantheon. He died through human cruelty, and far too young. His works, of course, will live--and he needs no more.

But, and I have no idea why, we also long for what I called visceral fellowship just above---some sense of physical continuity, some sign of an actual presence to transmit across the generations, so that we will not forget the person behind the glorious ideas. (Perhaps my dedication to such material continuity marks only a personal idiosyncrasy--but not, I think, a rare feeling, and certainly concentrated among those who choose paleontology for a profession, because they thrill to the objective records of life's continuous history.)

So let me end with a confession--well, not really a confession (for I have nothing to hide or to regard with shame) but rather a testimony. Through incredible good fortune, I was able to buy a remarkable item at auction a few months ago--the original set of proof plates, each personally signed by Lavoisier, of the seven figures (including the three reproduced here) that accompany his sole geological article of 1789. Two men signed each plate: first, in a thick and bold hand, Gabriel de Bory, vice-secretary of the French Academy of Sciences (signed "Bory Vice-Secretaire"); and second, in a much more delicate flow composed of three flourishes surrounding the letters of his last name alone, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier.

Lavoisier's own flourishes enhance the visual beauty of these plates that express the intellectual brilliance of his one foray into my field of geology--all signed in the year of the revolution that he greeted with such hope (and such willingness to work for its ideals); the revolution that eventually repaid his dedication in the most perversely cruel of possible ways. But now I hold a tiny little bit, only a symbol really, of Lavoisier's continuing physical presence in my professional world.