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Committee of Public Safety. He was one of a score of farmers-general who had been
taken prisoner and put on trial (the farmers-general had collected taxes on behalf of
the king). Borda organized the drafting of a letter calling attention to Lavoisier's
essential skills used in support of the work of the Commission for Weights and
Measures and stating that it was urgent for him to return to the important work which
was interrupted by his arrest. The letter was not well received and immediately called
forth a decree, signed by Robespierre himself, and four others, noting “the importance
of delegating duties and assigning various missions only to men whose republican
zeal and hatred of kings make them worthy of the public trust.” The Committee of
Public Safety declared that Delambre, Borda, Lavoisier, Laplace, and Coulomb
should “cease as of this day [23 December, 1793] to be members of the Commission
for Weights and Measures and shall deliver forthwith, with an inventory, any instru-
ments, calculations, notes and papers in their possession that may pertain to the
measurement project.” Delambre received his copy of the decree and had to return to
Paris in midwinter 1793-74. His house had been sealed and he was able to enter only
accompanied by local commissaries who scrutinized every paper in the house including
Delambre's membership certificate from the Royal Society of London, written in
Latin and signed by King George - a suspicious, royalist paper indeed! Delambre
once again faced interrogation and the possibility of the guillotine.
MÉCHAIN HAD NO EASIER time of it in his work measuring the southern part of
the meridian and his share of the proposed survey was half the length of Delambre's
- the distance from Rodez to Barcelona versus Delambre's section that ran from
Rodez to Dunkerque. The reason was that Delambre was resurveying what had
already been measured twice whereas Méchain was to survey the entirely new sector
in Spain and would have to reconnoiter for appropriate triangulation stations as well
as measure them. “Little did we know,” wrote Delambre (Méchain and Delambre
1806-10), referring to the civil unrest of the Revolution, “that the greatest difficulties
would be found at the gates of Paris.” Méchain left Paris on 24 June, 1792 accompa-
nied by his servant Citizen Tranchot. At Essonne he was immediately detained by a
roadblock of anxious citizens, armed and nervous, looking for counter-revolutionar-
ies, but the municipal officials had not lost the respect of the people and he was
allowed to continue his journey. Méchain arrived a week later in Perpignan and by
August, accompanied by a Spanish officer, Captain Gonzales, he was hauling his
equipment into the Pyrenees and looking for a triangulation route through Catalonia
towards Barcelona. Gonzales, an officer in the Spanish Navy, had been invited to
participate in the observations, to facilitate the relationships between Méchain and the
local Spanish authorities, and no doubt to keep an eye on the two foreigners!
The region's inhabitants were not French revolutionaries or aristocrats, but worse.
They were Spanish Bourbons, suspicious of French intentions, and Catalonian
rebels, suspicious of anything to do with either of the Spanish and French govern-
ments and doubly suspicious of something to do with both! Possibly they were also
smugglers or bandits, answerable to no-one except themselves. In the inns, the beds
that Méchain and his party slept on were boards on trestles and the food they ate
was all but inedible. By contrast with what else they faced as they journeyed
