in the Franco-German War, and, falling under suspicion as a Communist, left Paris for London. Here he studied etching with Sir Seymour Haden, drew caricatures for Vanity Fair, and painted portraits as well as genre subjects. It was many years before he turned to the chief labour of his career-the production of a series of 700 water-colour drawings to illustrate the life of Christ and the Old Testament. Some sudden shock or bereavement was said to have turned his thoughts from ideals of the café and the boulevard into a more serious channel. He disappeared from Paris, whither he had returned after a stay of some years in England, and went to Palestine. In 1895 the series of 350 drawings of incidents in the life of Christ was exhibited in Paris, and the following year found them on show in London. They were then published by the firm of Lemercier in Paris, who had paid him 1,100,000 francs for them. After this he turned to the scenes of the Old Testament, upon which he was still engaged at the abbey of Buillon, in the department of Doubs, France, when he died on the 8th of August 1902. The merits of Tissot’s Bible illustrations lay rather in the care with which he studied the details of scenery than in any quality of religious emotion. He seemed to aim, above all, at accuracy, and, in his figures, at a vivid realism, which was far removed from the conventional treatment of sacred types.
TISSOT, PIERRE FRANÇOIS (1768–1854), French man of letters, was born at Versailles on the 10th of March 1768. His father, a native of Savoy, was a perfumer appointed by royal warrant to the court. At the age of eighteen he entered the office of a procurer of the Chatelet, in order to learn the practice of the law; but he cultivated the Muses rather than the study of procedure, and, being a handsome youth, was occasionally invited to the fétes of the Trianon. He devoted himself ardently to the cause of the Revolution, in spite of the fact that it had ruined his family. While with the procurer he had made the acquaintance of Alexandre Goujon, and they soon became inseparable; he married Goujon’s sister, Sophie (March 5, 1793), and when his brother-in-law was elected deputy to the Convention and sent on a mission to the armies of the Moselle and Rhine, Tissot went with him as his secretary; he then returned to Paris and resumed his more modest position of secrétaire général des subsistances. On the 1st of Prairial he tried in vain to save his brother-in-law, who had been involved in the proscription of the “last Montagnards”; all he could do was to give Goujon the knife with which he killed himself in order to escape the guillotine, and he afterwards avenged his memory in the Souvenirs de Prairial. He also took under his care Goujon’s widow and children. His connexion with the Jacobin party caused him to be condemned to deportation after the attempt of the 3rd, Nivose in the year IX., but Bonaparte, having been persuaded to read his translation of the Bucolics, struck his name off the list. Though still a friend of the Republic, Tissot was henceforth an admirer of the First Consul; he celebrated in verse several of the emperor’s victories, and the arrival in France of Marie-Louise (1810). So far he had lived on the income derived from a factory of horn lanterns in the Faubourg St Antoine; and, being at last in fairly comfortable circumstances he now devoted himself to literature. The abbé Delille took him as his assistant at the College de France; and Tissot succeeded him as head of it (1813); the emperor signed the appointment as a reward for a poem composed by Tissot on his victory at Lützen. He was removed from this post, however, in 1821, in consequence of the publication of a Précis sur les guerres de la révolution, in which rather colourless work he had dared to say that the Convention had saved France and vanquished the Coalition. Deprived of his post, Tissot was left still more free to attack the government in the press. He was one of the founders of the newspaper Le Constitutionnel, and of the review, the Minerve. Without laying stress on his literary works (Traité de la poésie latine, 1821; translation of the Bucolics 3rd ed., 1823; Études sur Virgile, 1825) we should mention the Mémoires historiques et militaires sur Carnot, which he based on the papers left by the “Organizer of Victory” (1824), the Discours du Général Foy (1826) and a Histoire de la guerre de la Péninsule also inspired by Général Foy (1827). On the overthrow of Charles X., Tissot made a successful effort to regain his position at the College de France; he was also elected as a member of the French Academy on the death of Dacier (1835). It was then that he published his chief works: Histoire de Napoléon (2 vols., 1833), and Histoire complète de la révolution française de 1789 à 1806 (6 vols., 1833–1836), full of inconsistencies and omissions, but containing a number of the author’s reminiscences; in some places they become practically memoirs, and are consequently of real value. In 1840 a carriage accident almost cost him his sight; he had to find an assistant, and passed the last years of his life in circumstances of increasing suffering, amid which, however, he preserved his cheerfulness and goodness of heart. He died at Paris on the 7th of April 1854.
See an excellent essay on Tissot by P. Fromageot in the Revue de Versailles et de Seine-et-Oise, in 1901.
TISSUE (Fr. tissu, tissue, participle of tisser, Lat. texere, to weave), properly the name of a fine textile fabric interwoven with gold and silver threads, hence used of any delicate or gauzy fabric (see Gold and Silver Thread). It was also early applied, as in French, to a ribbon, fillet or various forms of woven ligaments. In biology the word is of general use for an aggregate of cells forming a texture or fabric; in animal anatomy it is thus applied to the primary layers of which the parts are composed, and named by some qualifying word denoting its substance or its use (see Connective Tissue and Epithelial, Endothelial and Glandular Tissue).
TISTA, a river of northern India, which rises on the edge of the Tibetan plateau, and flows through the mountain gorges of Sikkim and Darjeeling, till it spills itself over the plain of Eastern Bengal. In the 18th century its course was due south to join the Ganges; but in 1787 great floods diverted the stream towards the south-east, and it now enters the Brahmaputra, the whole district of Rangpur being scored by various interlacing channels. Its total length in British territory is about 170 m.
TISZA, KÁLMÁN [Koloman] (1830–1902), Hungarian statesman, was born at Geszt on the 10th of December 1830, the son of Lajos Tisza and the countess Julia Teleki, and was educated at his father’s castle. In 1848 he obtained a post in the ministry of instruction of the revolutionary government which he accompanied to Debreczen, After the war he went abroad with most of his family, and carefully studied foreign institutions. On returning home he devoted himself to the improvement of the family estates, and in 1855 was elected assistant curator of the Calvinist church at Nagyszalonta, in succession to his father. When, on the 1st of September 1859, the Austrian government issued the “Patent” which struck at the very roots of Protestant autonomy in Hungary, Tisza, at the congress of the Calvinist Church beyond the Theiss, held at Debreczen, publicly repudiated the Patent on behalf of the Calvinist laity. He renewed his opposition in the most uncompromising terms at the ensuing congress (Jan. 11, 1860), shrewdly guessing that the Patent was directed as much against the Hungarian constitution as against the Calvinist confession. His fears were justified by the October Diploma (see Hungary: History), which he attacked with equal vehemence. In August 1860 Tisza married the countess Helen Degenfeld-Schomburg, a union which brought him into close connexion with the Karolyis, the Podmaniczkys and the Odescalchis. He was unanimously elected to represent Debreczen at the 1861 Diet, and was elected vice-president of the house at its second session. The Diet was divided between the Addressers, led by Deak, and the “Resolutionists,” led by Count Laszlé Teleki, and on the death of the latter Tisza succeeded him as the leader of the more radical party. During the Provisorium (1861–1865) Tisza fought for constitutional reform in the columns of the Hon and the Magyar Sojtó, his leading articles, afterwards collected and published under the title of Alföldi Levelek (Letters from the Alföld), being by far the most important contribution to the controversy. When the Diet was again summoned by
