140 JOSEPH FOURIER. 



parchments. Thus it was not a something uuilefinable, which, by the 

 way, our ancestors, the Franks, had not yet invented, that was wanting 

 to young Fourier, but rather an income of a few hundred livres, which 

 the men who were then phiced at the head of the country would have 

 refused to acknowledge the genius of Newton as a just equivalent for! 

 Treasure up these facts, gentlemen ; they form an admirable illustration 

 of the immense advances which France has made during the last forty 

 years. Posterity, moreover, will see in this, not the excuse, but the 

 explanation of some of those sanguinary dissensions which stained our 

 first revolution. 



Fourier, not having been enabled to gird on the sword, assumed the 

 habit of a Benedictine, and repaired to the Abbey of St. Beuoit-sur-Loire, 

 where he intended to pass the period of his novitiate. He had not yet 

 taken any vows when, in 1789, every mind was captivated, with beauti- 

 fully seductive ideas relative to the social regeneration of France. 

 Fourier now renounced the profession of the church ; but this circum- 

 stance did not prevent his former masters from appointing him to the 

 principal chair of mathematics in the military school of Auxerre, and 

 bestowiug upon him numerous tokens of a lively and sincere aftection. I 

 venture to assert that no event in the life of our colleague affords a more 

 striking proof of the goodness of his natural disposition and the amia- 

 bility of his manners. It Avould be necessary not to know the human 

 heart to suppose that the monks of St. Benoit did not feel some chagrin 

 upon finding themselves so abruptly abandoned, to imagine especially 

 that they should give up without lively regret the glory which the order 

 might have expected from the ingenious colleague who had just escaped 

 from them. 



Fourier responded worthily to the confidence of which he had just 

 become the object. When his colleagues were indisposed, the titular 

 professor of mathematics occupied in turns the chairs of rhetoric, of 

 history, and of philosophy; and whatever might be the subject of his 

 lectures, he diffused among an audience which listened to him with de- 

 light the treasures of a varied and profound erudition, adorned with all 

 the brilliancy which the most elegant diction could impart to them. 



About the close of the year 1789, Fourier repaired to Paris and read 

 before the Academy of Sciences a memoir on the resolution of numerical 

 equations of all degrees. This work of his early youth our colleague, so 

 to speak, never lost sight of. He explained it at Paris to the ])U])ils of 

 the Polytechnic School ; he developed it upon the banks of the Nile in 

 presenceof the Institute of Egypt ; at Grenoble, from the year 1802, it was 

 his favorite subjectt of conversation with the i)rofessors of the Central 

 School and of the faculty of sciences. This finally contained the elements 

 of the work which Fourier was engaged in seeing through the i)ress when 

 death put an end to his career. 



A scientific subject does not occupy so much space in the life of a man 

 of science of the first rank without being ii^portant and difiicult. 



