(Robert François), as he possessed neither literature nor science, is not, strictly speaking, entitled to notice in this Work. His character, however, was so extraordinary, and the noise which he made in the world so great, that a short account of his life will probably be acceptable to a numerous class of our readers.
He was born in 1714 in the suburbs of Arras, called St Catharine. His infancy announced what he would one day become; for such were his wickednesses and knaveries, that they procured to him the appellation of Robert the Devil.
He served in the army, was at several engagements, and at the siege of Philipburgh. On his return to France, he entered in quality of a domestic into the college of Jesuits at Paris, which he left in 1738 to be married.
After having served different masters in the capital, and poisoned one of them by a glister, he committed a robbery of 240 louis d'ors; which being discovered obliged him to abscond. He lurked, therefore, about five months in the neighbourhood of St Omer, Dunkirk, and Bruxelles, holding always the most absurd purposes with regard to the disputes which at that time divided France. At Poperinge, a small town near Ypres, he was heard to say: "If I return to France—Yes, I will return, I will die there, and the greatest man on earth shall die likewise, and you shall hear news of me!"
It was in the month of August 1756 that he uttered these extravagant sentiments. On the 21st of December, in the same year, being at Faleque near Arras, at the house of one of his relations, he talked in the same strain, affirming, "That the kingdom, his wife, and daughter, were all ruined!" His blood, his heart, and his head, were at this time in a dreadful state of effervescence; and in this state of mind he set out for Paris, at which he arrived on the 31st day of the same month. Having appeared at Versailles on the first day of the year 1757, he took opium for two or three days, probably with a view to invigorate his mind for the horrid purpose, which he executed on the 5th of January, about three quarters of an hour after five in the evening.
This execrable parricide struck Louis XV. with a knife in the right side, as that monarch, surrounded by his courtiers, was entering a carriage to go to Trianon. He was seized upon the spot; and after having undergone some interrogatories at Versailles, was sent to Paris to the tower of Montgommery, where a room was prepared for him, above that which Ravillac had formerly occupied. The king charged the great court of parliament to institute his process; but notwithstanding the most cruel tortures, which he supported with unparalleled firmness, they could not get from him a single confession which could lead them to suspect that he had any accomplices. This miserable wretch
(a) See his Credibility of the Gospel History, and other works, in 11 vols 8vo. (c) See his Evidences of the Christian Religion, in 2 vols 8vo. DAM
Dane, wretch protested, that if he had been blooded as copiously as he wished, he would never have committed the crime. After being cruelly tortured to no purpose, he was condemned to die by the same punishment as the infamous afflatus of Henry IV.
The same year, on the 28th of March, which was the day of his execution, he arrived at the Place de Grève at a quarter past three, looking with a tearless eye and a firm countenance on the place and the instruments of his punishment. They first burned his right hand, afterwards tore his flesh with red hot pincers, and poured melted lead, wax, and pitch, into the wounds. They then proceeded to quarter him, the four horses trying in vain for ten minutes to dismember his body. At the end of that time, Damiers being still alive, the executioners cut with knives the flesh and tendinous joinings of his legs and arms; which they had formerly been obliged to do to Ravaille. They began with his legs; and even after they were cut, he continued to breathe till his arms were cut in like manner. His punishment, from the time he was put upon the scaffold to the moment of his death, lasted about an hour and a half; during the greater part of which he retained his recollection, and raised his head seven or eight times to view the horses and his mangled and burned limbs. In the middle of the most violent of the tortures, he even let some jokes escape him.
That the crime of Damiers was of the deepest dye, every man, but an afflatus like himself, will readily acknowledge; but the cruel and lingering punishment which was inflicted on him, was such as we think no human being intended to inflict on another. It was likewise impolitic as well as cruel. We can conceive no reason for lengthening out any punishment, or accompanying it with circumstances of horror, but to inspire the spectators with a detestation of the crime; but a punishment too severe produces a contrary effect, by withdrawing the attention from the crime to the criminal, and exciting compassion for his sufferings, and indignation against the authors of them. Such at least would be its effect in this country; but the minds of Frenchmen seem to be differently constituted from those of Britons.
Damiers was rather above the middle size; he had a long face, a bold and piercing countenance, and his mouth was a little sunk. He had contracted a kind of convulsive motion, by a custom he had of speaking to himself. He was full of vanity, desirous of signaling himself, curious of novelty; a flicker against government, though silent; conversing with himself internally; obstinate in prosecuting whatever he projected; bold to put it into execution; full of chirography, and a liar; by turns religious and wicked; committing faults at one time, and immediately after repenting of them, and continually agitated by violent impulses. "His crime (says a writer of genius) cost us as many groans as improbable projects of his came to light."
How, it has been asked, could a nation so mild and so polished as France, or an age which was called philosophic, produce an afflatus of a king so much beloved by his people?
To this question, the French author, whose work we have translated, answers: That at all times there have been wretches, who have taken neither of their age nor their country. A man, from the dregs of the people,
Suppl. Vol. I. Part II. Darcy, that knowledge of men and the world which neither books nor genius alone can give when one has neglected to live with his equals. Rejoicing in the esteem and confidence which he possessed in a great degree in France, there could be no better counsellor than he in the most important concerns. Yet his noble soul, delicate and honourable, was ignorant of deceit; and his prudence was too evident to be taken for finery. Pleasant and agreeable in conversation, but preferring truth in all cases, he never disputed unless there was occasion to defend it, which he did in such a firm manner as to give some people an idea that he was obstinate in disputing, which is seldom found among men than a cool and culpable indifference."
Dangeau (Philippe de Courcillon Marquis de), brother to the former, was born in 1638. The elegance of his wit and person advanced him at the court of Louis XIV. and his decided taste for letters procured him a place in the French academy and in that of sciences. He died at Paris in 1720, at the age of 82, chevalier of the order of the king, and grand master of the royal and military orders of our lady of Mont-Carmel and of Saint Lazarus of Jerusalem. When he was invested with this last dignity, he paid more attention than was formerly done to the choosing of chevaliers; he renewed the ancient pomp of their admission, which the public, always malicious, ridiculed. But that which should have screened him from ridicule was, that it procured him the foundation of 25 commanderies, and he employed the revenues to bring up 12 young men of the best nobility in France. Even envy then excused his elevation. At the court (says Fontenelle), where credit is never given to probity and virtue, he held always a fair and unblemished reputation. His conversation, his manners, were all regulated by a politeness, which was not the consequence merely of his associating with good company, but the offspring of an obliging and benevolent heart. We should pass over him, on account of his honourable manners, the desire he had to be a great lord. Madame de Montespan, who did not believe he could play this part, used to say in a malicious manner, that one could not help loving and despising him at the same time. He married, first Françoise Morin, sister to the Marechal d'Estrees, and afterwards the Countess de Laugle, of a very noble house, but not opulent.
There are extant manuscript memoirs by the Marquis Dangeau, in which there are several curious anecdotes of Voltaire, Henault, and Beaumelle. Dangeau, however, did not always write these memoirs; which, according to the author of the age of Louis XIV., were compiled by an old valet de chambre, who inserted in them, without order, every ridiculous thing which he heard in the antechamber, or read in the gazettes. There still remains a small work of Dangeau's, which paints, in an interesting manner, Louis the XIV. as he was in the midst of his court.
Darcy (Count), an ingenious philosopher and mathematician, was born in Ireland in the year 1725; but his friends being, like many other great and good families at that period, attached to the house of Stuart, he was at 14 years of age sent to France, where he spent the rest of his life. Giving early indications of a genius for science, he was put under the care of the celebrated Clairaut (see Clairaut, Encycl.), under whose tuition he improved so rapidly in the mathematics, that at 17 years of age he gave a new solution of the problem concerning the curve of equal pressure in a resisting medium. This was followed the year after by a determination of the curve described by a heavy body, sliding by its own weight along a moveable plane, at the same time that the pressure of the body causes a horizontal motion in the plane.
Though Darcy served in the war of 1744, he found leisure, during the bustle of a military life, to send two memoirs to the academy; the first of these contained a general principle in mechanics, that of the preservation of the rotatory motion; a principle which he again brought forward in 1750, by the name of the principle of the preservation of action. He was taken prisoner in this war by the English; and such was either the respect paid to science, or the mercy of the cabinet of St James's, that he was treated, not as an Irish rebel, but as a French subject fighting for his king and his country.
In 1760, Darcy published An Essay on Artillery, containing some curious experiments on the charges of gunpowder, &c. &c. and improvements on those of the ingenious Robins; a kind of experiments which our author carried on occasionally to the end of his life. In 1765, he gave to the public the most ingenious of all his works, his Memoir on the Duration of the Sensation of Sight; in which he endeavours to prove, and indeed completely proves, that a body may sometimes pass by our eyes without producing a sensation attended with consciousness or marking its presence, otherwise than by weakening the brightness of the object which it may chance to cover in its passage. If in this work he shall be thought to have taken hints from Dr Hartley, it is not perhaps too much to say, that some of our most celebrated writers on vision have since been beholden to Darcy. No man indeed has cause to be ashamed of being indebted to him; for all his works display in an eminent degree the union of genius and philosophy; but as he measured every thing upon the largest scale, and required extreme accuracy in experiment, neither his time, fortune, nor avocations, allowed him to execute more than a very small part of what he projected.
In his disposition, Darcy was amiable, spirited, lively, and a lover of independence; a passion to which he nobly sacrificed, even in the midst of literary society.—He died of a cholera morbus in 1779, at 54 years of age. He was admitted of the French academy in 1749, and was made pensioner-geometrician in 1770. His essays, printed in the Memoirs of the Academy of Sciences, are various and very ingenious, and are contained in the volumes for the years 1742, 1747, 1749, 1750, 1751, 1752, 1753, 1754, 1758, 1759, 1760, 1765, and in tom. 1. of the Savans Etrangers.
DATA of Euclid, the first in order of the books that have been written by the ancient geometers, to facilitate and promote the method of resolution or analysis. In general, a thing is said to be given which is either actually exhibited, or can be found out, that is, which is either known by hypothesis, or that can be demonstrated to be known; and the propositions in the book of Euclid's data shew what things can be found out or known, from those that by hypothesis are already known: so that in the analysis or investigation of a problem, from the things that are laid down as given DAU DEM
Demonstrated or known, by the help of these propositions, it is demonstrated that other things are given, and from these last that others again are given, and so on, till it is demonstrated that that which was proposed to be found out in the problem is given; and when this is done, the problem is solved, and its composition is made and derived from the compositions of the data which were employed in the analysis. And thus the data of Euclid are of the most general and necessary use in the solution of problems of every kind.
Maximus, at the end of his preface to the data, is mistaken in asserting that Euclid has not used the synthetical, but the analytical method in delivering them: for though in the analysis of a theorem, the thing to be demonstrated is assumed in the analysis; yet in the demonstrations of the data, the thing to be demonstrated, which is, that something is given, is never once assumed in the demonstration; from which it is manifest, that every one of them is demonstrated synthetically: though indeed if a proposition of the data be turned into a problem, the demonstration of the proposition becomes the analysis of the problem. Simplicius's Preface to his edition of the Data.