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readings, which will lead to another discovery, this one establishing a correlation between magnetic intensity and latitude (intensity increasing with latitude, as one moves away from the equator and toward the poles). He will write up his findings with great care and send them to Condorcet, and we have already followed their fate there.
    But now, imagine Lamanon’s triumphant return to France. The Academy of Sciences will invite him to join their august body, of course. He will readily accept, and there will be ample time, before the National Convention abolishes all of the academies, for Lamanon to make several personal appearances to discuss his part in the great Lap é rouse voyage. There will be time too, amid the social and political upheavals, to see to the formal publication of his own journals and letters. Will he do so ahead of Lap é rouse, without the approval of the ministry, as he threatened to do at Tenerife? Probably. The revolutionary mood that greets him on his return will encourage the antiauthoritarian streak we have already seen in him. Indeed, when his friend Mongez remonstrates with him about this, and asks if Lamanon does not owe Lap é rouse some consideration in this matter, Lamanon will retort with a quote from Rousseau: “My dear Mongez,” he will say, “the family is the most ancient of societies, and the only one that is natural. But even there the children remain attached to the father only so long as they need him for their preservation.”
    The book will not be the financial success Lamanon hopes; but then, books rarely are. His scientific legacy, however, will be secure. Because the first publication on barometric tides will not now be authored by some Englishman called Horsburgh in 1805. Nor will it be the great Prussian naturalist and explorer, Alexander von Humboldt, a man with more than enough distinctions already, who first publishes the law of magnetic intensity and latitudes. It will be Lamanon, publishing in 1789 or ’90 or ’91. It will be Lamanon, no longer the unfortunate naturalist from the Lap é rouse expedition killed by natives in Samoa.
    Which brings us to our second surmise: a different death. Consider what happens to Lamanon’s associates. Buffon will have died of natural causes in 1788, at the advanced age of eighty, thereby missing alike the thrills and the perils of revolution. By 1790, Madame Necker and her husband will flee to their native Switzerland. The Marshal de Castries, recipient of Lamanon’s beans, his wigs and medals grown suspect, will join them shortly thereafter. The rest remain in Paris, caught up in the grand project of rebuilding society. But one by one they too will fall under suspicion. The Duke de La Rochefoucauld, Lamanon supporter and president of the academy, will be assassinated in Gisors in September of 1792. A year and a half later, it will be Condorcet, on the run from a trumped-up charge of treason but arrested in Clamart, those distinctive eyebrows giving him away. He will be found dead in his prison cell two days later, his body and the cause of death subsequently lost to a mass grave. And then it will be Lavoisier himself, tried, convicted, and guillotined on May 8, 1794—nine years after Lamanon’s visit to pick up the barometer.
    What would Lamanon make of such a future? It is tempting to imagine him asking Lavoisier’s widow to marry him. But quite apart from the likelihood that she would refuse him (for she will remember that rainy afternoon only as an occasion when her dear Antoine embarrassed her in front of a guest whose name and purpose she cannot recall), there is the greater likelihood that Lamanon himself will end up branded an enemy of the republic. He might return to Salon-de-Provence to flee the unrest, but he will not be safe there. His brother, Auguste, will be arrested in 1793 and languish in prison for over a year before finally being released. Robert, with his closer