The administrative conflicts, the source of which lay in the very bosom of the Council of the Commune, daily drew from Bailly the following exclamation, a faithful image of his mind:  I have ceased to be happy.  The embarrassments that proceeded from external sources touched him much less, and yet they were far from contemptible.  Let us surmount our repugnance, although a reasonable one; let us cast a firm look on the sink where the unworthy calumnies were manufactured, of which Bailly was for some time the object.

Several years before our first revolution, a native of Neufchatel quitted his mountains, traversed the Jura, and lighted upon Paris.  Without means, without any recognized talent, without eminence of any sort, repulsive in appearance, of a more than negligent deportment, it seemed unlikely that he should hope, or even dream, of success; but the young traveller had been told to have full confidence, although a celebrated academician had not yet given that singular definition of our country, “France is the home of foreigners.”  At all events, the definition was not erroneous in this instance, for soon after his arrival, the Neufchatelois was appointed physician to the household of one of the princes of the royal family, and formed strict intimacies with the greater part of the powerful people about the court.

This stranger thirsted for literary glory.  Amongst his early productions, a medico-philosophical work figured in three volumes, relative to the reciprocal influences of the mind and the body.  The author thought he had produced a chef d’oeuvre; even Voltaire was not thought to be above analyzing it suitably; let us hasten to say that the illustrious old man, yielding to the pressing solicitations of the Duke de Praslin, one of the most active patrons of the Swiss doctor, promised to study the work and give his opinion of it.

The author was at the acme of his wishes.  After having pompously announced that the seat of the soul is in the meninges (cerebral membrane), could there be any thing to fear from the liberal thinker of Ferney?  He had only forgotten that the patriarch was above all a man of good taste, and that the book on the body and soul offended all the proprieties of life.  Voltaire’s article appeared.  He began with this severe and just lesson—­“We should not be prodigal of contempt towards others, and of esteem for ourselves, to such a degree as will be revolting to our readers.”  The end was still more overwhelming.  “We see harlequin everywhere cutting capers to amuse the pit.”

Harlequin had received a sufficient dose.  Not having succeeded in literature, he threw himself upon the sciences.

On betaking himself to this new career, the doctor of Neufchatel attacked Newton.  But unluckily his criticisms were directed precisely to those points wherein optics may vie in evidence with geometry itself.  This time the patron was M. de Maillebois, and the tribunal the Academy of Sciences.