The day he was to ascend the scaffold, Jean-Jacques wrote to his wife a letter full of the most 
sublime simplicity, resignation and heroic tenderness, in which you will find these words: “Say 
nothing to Josephine (the name of his daughter) of the unhappy fate of her father; try to keep her 
ever in ignorance of it. As to my son, I expect everything of him.” Alas! the victim 
deluded himself. The blow was too severe, it was beyond the strength of a young man of eighteen; 
Ampère was completely paralyzed by it. His intellectual faculties, so active, so ardent and well 
developed, seemed suddenly to degenerate into a complete idiocy. He would pass whole days 
mechanically contemplating the skies and the earth, or in heaping up little piles of sand. His 
anxious friends, fearing his symptoms gave indication of a fatal and rapid decline, tried to entice 
him into the neighboring woods of Poleymieux, to arouse him, if possible, from this lethargy, where 
“he was,” (I use the very words of our associate,) a mute witness, “an observer without eyes 
or thought. ” 
This torpor of all feeling, mental and moral, lasted for more than a year, when the botanical 
letters of J.J. Rousseau falling into his hands, their clear, harmonious language seemed to 
penetrate into the very soul of the afflicted youth, and in some degree to restore tone to his mind, 
as the rays of the rising-sun pierce the thick fogs of the morning and bear life into the bosom of 
the plant that the “numb cold night” had rendered torpid. About the same time a volume, 
accidentally opened, brought to his notice some lines from the ode of Horace to Lucinius. These 
lines seemed to convey no meaning to our friend, to him who had merely learned Latin with sufficient 
accuracy to enable him to read essays on mathematics; but their cadence charmed him, and from this 
time, contrary to the principles of the moralist who declares the human mind incapable of 
entertaining at the same time more than one ardent passion, Ampère gave himself up with 
unrestrained zeal to the simultaneous studies of plants and the poets of the Augustan age. A volume 
of the Corpus Poetarum Latinorum accompanied him in his herborazations, as well as the 
works of Linnæus, and the meadows and hills of Poleymieux resounded daily with declamations from 
Horace, Virgil, Lucretius, and especially from Lucian, in the intervals of his dissections of a 
corolla or the examination of a petal. The quantity of the Latin words became so familiar to 
Ampère, that forty years after, he composed one hundred and fifty eight technical lines in a 
post-chaise during a tour of inspection of the universities, without once referring to the 
Gradus. 
The botanical knowledge he acquired in these solitary studies was as profound as it was lasting. It 
is my good fortune to be able to cite on this point the unexceptionable and striking testimony of 
our colleague, M. Auguste de Saint-Hilaire. 
The genus Begonia was among the number of those classed by the illustrious de Jussieu under the 
head of incertu sedis, because he