All accounts appear to show that Davy hardly treated his hosts with the cordiality and respect they extended to him. His Chauvinism seemed to get the better of his courtesy. There was, it is said, a flippancy in his manner and a superciliousness and hauteur in his deportment which surprised as much as they offended. Napoleon, with characteristic bluntness, told one of the members of the Institute that he had heard the young English chemist had a poor opinion of them all. Dr. Paris, who could certainly speak from personal knowledge, states that Davy’s unfortunate manner was not so much the expression of a haughty consciousness of superiority as the desire to conceal a _mauvaise honte_ and _gaucherie_--an ungraceful timidity he could never conquer, and which often led him to force himself into a state of effrontery and with a violence of effort which passed for a sally of pride or the ebullition of temper. Whatever Davy’s manner might have been, it was not allowed to affect the admiration felt for his genius, and on December 13th, 1813, he was with practical unanimity elected a Corresponding Member of the First Class of the Institute. During the last week of the preceding November Ampère had given Davy a small quantity of a substance which he had obtained from Clement, and which had been discovered by Courtois, a soap-boiler and manufacturer of saltpetre in Paris, in kelp or the ashes of sea-weeds. The substance had the extraordinary property of giving a violet-coloured vapour, but its true nature and relations were unknown, and it was commonly designated as X. Although actually known for some time previously, the first public notice of its existence was made by Clement at a meeting of the Institute on November 29th, 1813, and at the meeting on December 6th Gay Lussac presented a short note on the substance, to which he gave the name _iode_, and stated that it had analogies to chlorine. A week later--that is, on the day of Davy’s election to the Institute--a letter from him to Cuvier was read, in which he gave a general view of the chemical characters of the body; and on January 20th, 1814, a paper by him, dated Paris, December 10th, 1813, and entitled “Some Experiments and Observations on a new Substance which becomes a violet-coloured Gas by Heat,” was read to the Royal Society.