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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. Soemmering did not for a long
Vienna, which closed the Austrian campaign, Napoleon I. had, on the 6th July, 1809, (the day on which Soemmerring began to make his telegraph) created a Baron, and subsequently at St. Helena, in his will, he left him one hundred thousand francs, adding, “C’est l’homme le plus vertueux que j’aie connu.” 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.
