At any time a visit from the excellent M. Pons, whom I have since seen director of the Observatory at Florence, would have been very agreeable to me; but, during my quarantine, I felt it unappreciably valuable.  It proved to me that I had returned to my native soil.

Two or three days before our admission to freedom, we experienced a loss which was deeply felt by each of us.  To pass away the heavy time of a severe quarantine, the little Algerine colony was in the habit of going to an enclosure near the lazaretto, where a very beautiful gazelle, belonging to M. Dubois Thainville, was confined; she bounded about there in full liberty with a grace which excited our admiration.  One of us endeavoured to stop this elegant animal in her course; he seized her unluckily by the leg, and broke it.  We all ran, but only, alas! to witness a scene which excited the deepest emotion in us.

The gazelle, lying on her side, raised her head sadly; her beautiful eyes (the eyes of a gazelle!) shed torrents of tears; no cry of complaint escaped her mouth; she produced that effect upon us which is always felt when a person who is suddenly struck by an irreparable misfortune, resigns himself to it, and shows his profound anguish only by silent tears.

Having ended my quarantine, I went at once to Perpignan, to the bosom of my family, where my mother, the most excellent and pious of women, caused numerous masses to be said to celebrate my return, as she had done before to pray for the repose of my soul, when she thought that I had fallen under the daggers of the Spaniards.  But I soon quitted my native town to return to Paris; and I deposited at the Bureau of Longitude and the Academy of Sciences my observations, which I had succeeded in preserving amidst the perils and tribulations of my long campaign.

A few days after my arrival, on the 18th of September, 1809, I was nominated an academician in the place of Lalande.  There were fifty-two voters; I obtained forty-seven voices, M. Poisson four, and M. Nouet one.  I was then twenty-three years of age.

A nomination made with such a majority would appear, at first sight, as if it could give rise to no serious difficulties; but it proved otherwise.  The intervention of M. de Laplace, before the day of ballot, was active and incessant to have my admission postponed until the time when a vacancy, occurring in the geometry section, might enable the learned assembly to nominate M. Poisson at the same time as me.  The author of the Mecanique Celeste had vowed to the young geometer an unbounded attachment, completely justified, certainly, by the beautiful researches which science already owed to him.  M. de Laplace could not support the idea that a young astronomer, younger by five years than M. Poisson, a pupil, in the presence of his professor at the Polytechnic School, should become an academician before him.  He proposed to me, therefore, to write to the Academy that I would