Captain Cook was dead, massacred by the savages, but the ardor which had animated him was not extinct; on the 10th of August, 1785, a French sailor, M. de La Peyrouse, left Brest with two frigates for the purpose of completing the discoveries of the English explorer.  The king had been pleased to himself draw up his instructions, bearing the impress of an affectionate and over-strained humanity.  “His Majesty would regard it as one of the happiest successes of the expedition,” said the instructions, “if it were terminated without having cost the life of a single man.”  La Peyrouse and his shipmates never came back.  Louis XVI. was often saddened by it.  “I see what it is quite well,” the poor king would repeat, “I am not lucky.”

M. de La Peyrouse had scarcely commenced the preparations for his fatal voyage, when, on the 5th of June, 1783, the States of the Vivarais, assembled in the little town of Annonay, were invited by MM. de Montgolfier, proprietors of a large paper-manufactory, to be witnesses of an experiment in physics.  The crowd thronged the thoroughfare.  An enormous bag, formed of a light canvas lined with paper, began to swell slowly before the curious eyes of the public; all at once the cords which held it were cut, and the first balloon rose majestically into the air.  Successive improvements made in the Montgolfiers’ original invention permitted bold physicists ere long to risk themselves in a vessel attached to the air-machine.  There sailed across the Channel a balloon bearing a Frenchman, M. Blanchard, and an Englishman, Dr. Jefferies; the latter lost his flag.  Blanchard had set the French flag floating over the shores of England; public enthusiasm welcomed him on his return.  The queen was playing cards at Versailles.  “What I win this game shall go to Blanchard,” she said.  The same feat, attempted a few days later by a professor of physics, M. Pilatre de Rozier, was destined to cost him his life.

So many scientific explorations, so many new discoveries of nature’s secrets were seconded and celebrated by an analogous movement in literature.  Rousseau had led the way to impassioned admiration of the beauties of nature; Bernardin de St. Pierre had just published his Etudes de la Nature; he had in the press his Paul et Virginie; Abbe Delille was reading his Jardin, and M. de St. Lambert his Saisons.  In their different phases and according to their special instincts, all minds, scholarly or political, literary or philosophical, were tending to the same end, and pursuing the same attempt.  It was nature which men wanted to discover or recover:  scientific laws and natural rights divided men’s souls between them.  Buffon was still alive, and the great sailors were every day enriching with their discoveries the Jardin du Roi; the physicists and the chemists, in the wake of Lavoisier, were giving to science a language intelligible to common folks; the jurisconsults were attempting to reform the rigors of criminal legislation at the same time with the abuses they had entailed, and Beaumarchais was bringing on the boards his Manage de Figaro.