In a military school directed by monks, the minds of the pupils necessarily waver only between two careers in life—­the church and the sword.  Like Descartes, Fourier wished to be a soldier; like that philosopher, he would doubtless have found the life of a garrison very wearisome.  But he was not permitted to make the experiment.  His demand to undergo the examination for the artillery, although strongly supported by our illustrious colleague Legendre, was rejected with a severity of expression of which you may judge yourselves:  “Fourier,” replied the minister, “not being noble, could not enter the artillery, although he were a second Newton.”

Gentlemen, there is in the strict enforcement of regulations, even when they are most absurd, something respectable which I have a pleasure in recognizing; in the present instance nothing could soften the odious character of the minister’s words.  It is not true in reality that no one could formerly enter into the artillery who did not possess a title of nobility; a certain fortune frequently supplied the want of parchments.  Thus it was not a something undefinable, which, by the way, our ancestors the Franks had not yet invented, that was wanting to young Fourier, but rather an income of a few hundred livres, which the men who were then placed at the head of the country would have refused to acknowledge the genius of Newton as a just equivalent for!  Treasure up these facts, Gentlemen; they form an admirable illustration of the immense advances which France has made during the last forty years.  Posterity, moreover, will see in this, not the excuse, but the explanation of some of those sanguinary dissensions which stained our first revolution.

Fourier not having been enabled to gird on the sword, assumed the habit of a Benedictine, and repaired to the Abbey of St. Benoit-sur-Loire, where he intended to pass the period of his noviciate.  He had not yet taken any vows when, in 1789, every mind was captivated with beautifully seductive ideas relative to the social regeneration of France.  Fourier now renounced the profession of the Church; but this circumstance did not prevent his former masters from appointing him to the principal chair of mathematics in the Military School of 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 themselves 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 profound erudition, adorned with all the brilliancy which the most elegant diction could impart to them.