A few years later Saint-Simon formed designs for a canal to connect Madrid with the sea, and might possibly have succeeded in realizing them, had not the French Revolution recalled him to France. He sided with the people, although his family traditions and early training would have led him to connect himself with the royalists, and although in the struggle he lost the property he had inherited from his mother. He was elected president of the commune where his property was situated, in 1789, and in an address to the electors proclaimed his intention to renounce the title of count, since he regarded it as inferior to that of citizen; and he refused another office lest it should be supposed he owed it to his rank. All this, however, did not prevent his imprisonment on account of his nobility, which rendered him in the eyes of the terrorists a dangerous character. He was kept in prison, first at St. Pélagie, afterwards at the Luxembourg, for eleven months, and was released after the Revolution of Thermidor. It was at this time that his ancestor Charlemagne appeared to him and encouraged him with a prophecy of future greatness. He describes the vision in these words: “At the most cruel epoch of the Revolution, and during a night of my detention at the Luxembourg, Charlemagne appeared to me and said: ‘Since the world has existed, no family has enjoyed the honor of producing a hero and a philosopher of the first rank; this honor has been reserved for my house. My son, thy success as a philosopher will equal mine as a warrior and politician.’” Upon his release from prison Saint-Simon began to speculate in the confiscated national lands, in order to obtain money to enable him to prosecute his plans for the improvement of society. He realized 144,000 francs from his investments, and then retired from business, as he thought he had all the property he needed. He devoted the following seven years to preparatory study, taking up his abode first in the neighborhood of the École Polytechnique, afterwards near the École de Médecine. Physiology and the physical sciences interested him chiefly. What he had in view was a science of the sciences, a science to classify facts derived from all sciences and to unite them into one whole; and it was from him that his scholar, Auguste Comte, derived the idea of founding a universal science, as he attempted in his “Cours de Philosophie Positive.” In fact this work was only a development of his “Système Politique Positive,” which he, as a scholar of Saint-Simon, wrote at the instance of his master.[40]