Page:Hamel Telegraph history England 1859.pdf/14

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10

After Baron Larrey’s departure from Munich, Soemmerring composed a description of his telegraphic apparatus in French, under the title: “Mémoire sur le Télégraphe,” which, on the 12th of November, he forwarded to Larrey, in Paris. As he flattered himself that the Baron would find an opportunity to exhibit the telegraph before the Emperor Napoleon, he begged, in his letter, to be informed with what attention His Imperial Majesty might honour his invention. He also hoped that some members of the Institute might approve of it. Soemmerring did not for a long time receive any account from Baron Larrey. At last the latter wrote that he had presented the telegraph in the beginning of 1810 to the Institute, but no resolution had been come to.

I have been permitted, in Paris, to examine the Journals

    In August and September, 1826, Baron Larrey had made a tour in England, Scotland, and Ireland, with his son Hippolyte, now Surgeon-in-ordinary to the Emperor Napoleon III., whom he lately accompanied to Italy. He died in 1842. In the court before the former military hospital, now military medical school, Val de Grace, in the Rue St. Jacques, at Paris, where he had been long usefully active, his statue in bronze is placed on a monument, erected in 1850. Larrey is represented pressing Napoleon’s last will against his heart. Of the four bas-reliefs on the pedestal, one refers to the campaign in Egypt, one to that in Spain, the third to the battle of Austerlitz, and the fourth to the dreadful passage of the French army over the Berezina, on the retreat from Moscow in 1812.