In the fall term of 2012 I was assigned to read The Path of the Law, a famous lecture given by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in January 1897 at the dedication of Boston University Law School’s new building. My professor pointed out the following passage at the end of it:
The object of ambition, power, generally presents itself nowadays in the form of money alone. Money is the most immediate form, and is a proper object of desire. “The fortune,” said Rachel, “is the measure of the intelligence.” That is a good text to waken people out of a fool’s paradise. But, as Hegel says [Phil. des Rechts, §190], “It is in the end not the appetite, but the opinion, which has to be satisfied.”1
Here we have two mighty authorities weighing in on the ends of human life. Hegel gets his due citation, and also the last word on the subject. But who is ‘Rachel’, and why does Holmes quote her for her gnomic wisdom? According to my professor, neither he nor anyone else had ever figured this out.
Last night I made a chance discovery that solved the mystery. Holmes’s immediate source was probably an 1858 article in Harper’s Monthly about the life and death of the famous French actress Elisabeth-Rachel Félix (1821–1858), universally known by the single name ‘Rachel’. Here is the relevant paragraph:
In the course of conversation one day a topic was introduced which induced her to allude to her wealth. She stated she took great pride in it, inasmuch as it was entirely due to her own, she might say, unaided efforts, had been accumulated in a few years, and would remain after she was gone as a record of her successful career—adding the happy aphorism so redolent with the spirit of the age, that for an artist, “La fortune, c’est la mesure de l’intelligence.”2
I do wonder what could possibly have brought this forty-year-old article to the attention of Holmes, who was seventeen when it was published in 1858. It is vain, gossipy, and altogether bad; I encourage you not to read it.
Holmes, ‘The Path of the Law’, The Boston Law School Magazine 1, no. 4 (February 1897): pp. 1–18 [18].
[C. Marie], ‘My Acquaintance with Rachel’, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 16, no. 96 (May 1858): pp. 805–12 [809]. The article is unsigned, but a later index to Harper’s gives the attribution.