380 '- JOSEPH FOURIER. 
Auxerre, and bestowing upon him numerous tokens of a 
lively and sincere affection. 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 
amiability of his manners. It would be necessary not 
to know the human heart to suppose that the monks of 
St. Benoit did not feel some chagrin upon finding them- | 
selves 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 delight, the treasures of a varied and pro- 
found erudition, adorned with all the brilliancy which 
the most elegant diction could impart to them. 
MEMOIR ON THE RESOLUTION OF NUMERICAL EQUA- 
TIONS. 
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 
pupils of the Polytechnic School; he developed it upon 
the banks of the Nile in presence of the Institute of 
Egypt; at Grenoble, from the year 1802, it was his 
favourite subject of conversation with the Professors of 
the Central School and of the Faculty of Sciences ; this 
