The Academy of Sciences had already for many years had sittings in one of the rooms of the king’s library.  Like the French Academy, it had owed its origin to private meetings at which Descartes, Gassendi, and young Pascal were accustomed to be present.  “There are in the world scholars of two sorts,” said a note sent to Colbert about the formation of the new Academy.  “One give themselves up to science because it is a pleasure to them:  they are content, as the fruit of their labors, with the knowledge they acquire, and, if they are known, it is only amongst those with whom they converse unambitiously and for mutual instruction; these are bona fide scholars, whom it is impossible to do without in a design so great as that of the Academie royale.  There are others who cultivate science only as a field which is to give them sustenance, and, as they see by experience that great rewards fall only to those who make the most noise in the world, they apply themselves especially, not to making new discoveries, for hitherto that has not been recompensed, but to whatever may bring them into notice; these are scholars of the fashionable world, and such as one knows best.”  Colbert had the true scholar’s taste; he had brought Cassini from Italy to take the direction of the new Observatory; he had ordered surveys for a general map of France; he had founded the Journal des Savants; literary men, whether Frenchmen or foreigners, enjoyed the king’s bounties.  Colbert had even conceived the plan of a Universal Academy, a veritable forerunner of the Institute.  The arts were not forgotten in this grand project; the academy of painting and sculpture dated from the regency of Anne of Austria; the pretensions of the Masters of Arts (maitres is arts), who placed an interdict upon artists not belonging to their corporation, had driven Charles Lebrun, himself the son of a Master, to agitate for its foundation; Colbert added to it the academy of music and the academy of architecture, and created the French school of painting at Rome.  Beside the palace for a long time past dedicated to this establishment, lived, for more than thirty-five years, Le Poussin, the first and the greatest of all the painters of that French school which was beginning to spring up, whilst the Italian school, though blooming still in talent and strength, was forgetting more and more every day the nobleness, the purity, and the severity of taste which had carried to the highest pitch the art of the fifteenth century.  The tradition of the masters in vogue in Italy, of the Caracci, of Guido, of Paul Veronese, had reached Paris with Simon Vouet, who had long lived at Rome.  He was succeeded there by a Frenchman “whom, from his grave and thoughtful air, you would have taken for a father of Sorbonne,” says M. Vitet in his charming Vie de Lesueur:  “his black eye beneath his thick eyebrow nevertheless flashed forth a glance full of poesy and youth.  His manner