Pasteur also thought that reforms should begin from the top. He prepared a paper dated from Lyons, and entitled “Why France found no superior men in the hours of peril.” Amongst the mistakes committed, one in particular had been before his mind for twenty years, ever since he left the Ecole Normale: “The forgetfulness, disdain even, that France had had for great intellectual men, especially in the realm of exact science.” This seemed the more sad to him that things had been very different at the end of the eighteenth century. Pasteur enumerated the services rendered by science to his threatened country. If in 1792 France was able to face danger on all sides, it was because Lavoisier, Fourcroy, Guyton de Morveau, Chaptal, Berthollet, etc., discovered new means of extracting saltpetre and manufacturing gunpowder; because Monge found a method of founding cannon with great rapidity; and because the chemist Clouet invented a quick system of manufacturing steel. Science, in the service of patriotism, made a victorious army of a perturbed nation. If Marat, with his slanderous and injurious insinuations, had not turned from their course the feelings of the mob, Lavoisier never would have perished on the scaffold. The day after his execution, Lagrange said: “One moment was enough for his head to fall, and 200 years may not suffice to produce such another.” Monge and Berthollet, also denounced by Marat, nearly shared the same fate: “In a week’s time we shall be arrested, tried, condemned and executed,” said Berthollet placidly to Monge, who answered with equal composure, thinking only of the country’s defence, “All I know is that my gun factories are working admirably.” Bonaparte, from the first, made of science what he would have made of everything--a means of reigning. When he started for Egypt, he desired to have with him a staff of scientists, and Monge and Berthollet undertook to organize that distinguished company. Later, when Bonaparte became Napoleon I, he showed, in the intervals between his wars, so much respect for the place due to science as to proclaim the effacement of national rivalry when scientific discoveries were in question. Pasteur, when studying this side of the Imperial character, found in some pages by Arago on Monge that, after Waterloo, Napoleon, in a conversation he had with Monge at the Elysée, said, “Condemned now to command armies no longer, I can see but Science with which to occupy my mind and my soul....”