14. One of the most remarkable of the company in some respects is Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger (1722-1759), of whom Diderot gives a vivid account in a sketch prefixed to the posthumous L'Antiquité dévoilée par ses usages (1766). At the Collège de Beauvais, Boulanger was so little stimulated by his scholastic teachers that they looked for nothing from him in his maturity. When, however, at the age of seventeen, he began to study mathematics and architecture, his faculties began to develop; and the life, first of a military engineer in 1743-44, and later in the service of the notable department of Roads and Bridges--the most efficient of all State services under Louis XV--made him an independent and energetic thinker. The chronic spectacle of the corvée, the forced labour of peasants on the roads, moved him to indignation; but he sought peace in manifold study, the engineer's contact with nature arousing in him all manner of speculations, geological and sociological. Seeking for historic light, he mastered Latin, which he had failed to do at school, reading widely and voraciously; and when the Latins failed to yield him the light he craved he systematically mastered Greek, reading the Greeks as hungrily and with as little satisfaction. Then he turned indefatigably to Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic, gleaning at best verbal clues which at length he wrought into a large, loose, imaginative yet immensely erudite schema of ancient social evolution, in which the physicist's pioneer study of the structure and development of the globe controls the anthropologist's guesswork as to the beginnings of human society. The whole is set forth in the bulky posthumous work Recherches sur l'origine du despotisme oriental (1761), and in the further treatise L'antiquité dévoilée (3 tom. 1766), which is but the concluding section of the first-named.