Flammarion

Stooping among his instruments in a lonely observatory at Juvisy, France, Camille Flammarion, 83, famed French astronomer, felt a chill in his side, slipped to the floor. Many hours later, footsteps rang on the stone stairway. The servant who entered found Flammarion where he had fallen. One arm was twisted under his body. His face, scribbled with an extraordinary network of fine lines, was curiously dis- ordered under the bush of his white hair. He was dead. When Camille Flammarion was 9, he saw an eclipse. It was not the spectacle of the little moon lying like a black penny in the huge dead eye of the sun that astounded him; that, he is said to have remarked, was "a simple piece of mummery, duplicable with a candle and a franc piece." But the thing that amazed him was that men, by means of charts, dials and tubes to peer through, had calculated to an 'instant the occurrence of this entertainment. He began to study Astronomy. When, at 16, he entered the Paris Observatory, he had already written a volume on cosmography. With Aeronaut Godard he ascended in a balloon to observe the heavens, wrote his researches in books that surpassed in popularity the works of Anatole France, Pierre Loti. He founded the French Astronomical Society, edited a monthly review, L'Astronomie. In the War of 1870, he served France, spying upon the Prussian troops with his long telescope. An admirer, one M. Meret, presented him with a country place at Juvisy, where he built an observatory, passed his time peering at the planet Mars and collecting ghost stories. Never a great scientist, he was still mumbling about the probable inhabitability of Mars while his colleagues were concerned with the atomic structures of stars not yet named; but he exploited with marvelous eloquence the romance of the stars. Under the big tent top of heaven he, a circus barker, shouted the seductions of Venus, the deformities of Mercury, the spots, habits, abilities of Uranus, Jupiter, Neptune. He was the jongleur of the Milky Way.