On the other hand, what a day, not of laughter, was that, when he threatened, for lucre’s sake, to lay sacrilegious hand on the Palais-Royal Garden! (1781-82. (Dulaure, viii. 423.)) The flower-parterres shall be riven up; the Chestnut Avenues shall fall:  time-honoured boscages, under which the Opera Hamadryads were wont to wander, not inexorable to men.  Paris moans aloud.  Philidor, from his Cafe de la Regence, shall no longer look on greenness; the loungers and losels of the world, where now shall they haunt?  In vain is moaning.  The axe glitters; the sacred groves fall crashing,—­for indeed Monseigneur was short of money:  the Opera Hamadryads fly with shrieks.  Shriek not, ye Opera Hamadryads; or not as those that have no comfort.  He will surround your Garden with new edifices and piazzas:  though narrowed, it shall be replanted; dizened with hydraulic jets, cannon which the sun fires at noon; things bodily, things spiritual, such as man has not imagined;—­and in the Palais-Royal shall again, and more than ever, be the Sorcerer’s Sabbath and Satan-at-Home of our Planet.

What will not mortals attempt?  From remote Annonay in the Vivarais, the Brothers Montgolfier send up their paper-dome, filled with the smoke of burnt wool. (5th June, 1783.) The Vivarais provincial assembly is to be prorogued this same day:  Vivarais Assembly-members applaud, and the shouts of congregated men.  Will victorious Analysis scale the very Heavens, then?

Paris hears with eager wonder; Paris shall ere long see.  From Reveilion’s Paper-warehouse there, in the Rue St. Antoine (a noted Warehouse),—­the new Montgolfier air-ship launches itself.  Ducks and poultry are borne skyward:  but now shall men be borne. (October and November, 1783.) Nay, Chemist Charles thinks of hydrogen and glazed silk.  Chemist Charles will himself ascend, from the Tuileries Garden; Montgolfier solemnly cutting the cord.  By Heaven, he also mounts, he and another?  Ten times ten thousand hearts go palpitating; all tongues are mute with wonder and fear; till a shout, like the voice of seas, rolls after him, on his wild way.  He soars, he dwindles upwards; has become a mere gleaming circlet,—­like some Turgotine snuff-box, what we call ‘Turgotine Platitude;’ like some new daylight Moon!  Finally he descends; welcomed by the universe.  Duchess Polignac, with a party, is in the Bois de Boulogne, waiting; though it is drizzly winter; the 1st of December 1783.  The whole chivalry of France, Duke de Chartres foremost, gallops to receive him. (Lacretelle, 18me Siecle, iii. 258.)

Beautiful invention; mounting heavenward, so beautifully,—­so unguidably!  Emblem of much, and of our Age of Hope itself; which shall mount, specifically-light, majestically in this same manner; and hover,—­tumbling whither Fate will.  Well if it do not, Pilatre-like, explode; and demount all the more tragically!—­So, riding on windbags, will men scale the Empyrean.