André Chénier

People who like science, France's greatest chemist, Antoine Lavoisier, he's for the chop as well.

If you like poetry, France's greatest poet, André Chénier, is also guillotined.

As are, of course, hundreds of ordinary men and women, as one historian puts it, who had muttered too loudly about the price of bread.

Counter-revolutionary behavior.

She misses her husband.

We read the poetry of André Chenier together.

She knew him, you

know.

'Lucien,' said David, 'do you know what I have just received from Paris?' He drew a tiny volume from his pocket.

'Listen.' And David read, as a poet can read, first André de Chénier's 'Idée ne l'air,' then 'Le malade,' following on with the elegy on a suicide, another elegy in the classic taste, and the last two iambs.

'So that is André de Chénier,' Lucien exclaimed again and again.

'It fills one with despair,' he cried for the third time when David surrendered the book to him, unable to read further for emotion.

'A poet rediscovered by a poet,' said Lucien, reading the signature of the preface.

He thought that Lucien's poem, Saint John and Patmos, was possibly too biblical to be read before an audience but little familiar with apocalyptic poetry.

Lucien, making his first appearance before the most exacting public in the Charente, seemed to be nervous.

David advised him to take André de Chénier and substitute certain pleasure for a dubious delight.