Arbitrary and despotic will succeeds in creating silence, but not in breaking it at a given time, and in a specified direction. In vain did Napoleon institute prizes every ten years; in vain did he demand from the several classes of the Institute reports on the progress of human thought since 1789. Literary genius remained deaf to his voice, and the real talent of several poets of a secondary order, Delille, Esmenard, Millevoye, Chênédollé, was not sufficient to triumph over the intellectual apathy which seemed to envelope the people he governed. "When I entered the world, in 1807," said Guizot, "chaos had reigned for a long time; the excitement of 1789 had entirely disappeared; and society, being completely occupied in settling itself, thought no more of the character of its amusements; the spectacles of force had replaced for it the aspirations towards liberty. In the midst of the general reaction, the faithful heirs of the literary salons of the eighteenth century remained the only strangers in them. The mistakes and disasters of the Revolution had not made the survivors of that brilliant generation abjure their ideas and desires; they remained sincerely liberal, but without pressing demands, and with the reserve of those who have succeeded little and suffered much in their endeavors after reform and government. They held fast to the liberty of speech, but did not aspire to power; they detested, and sharply criticised, despotism, but without doing anything to repress or overturn it. It was an opposition made by enlightened and independent spectators, who had no chance and no desire to interfere as actors." Thus it was that the lassitude of the superior classes, decimated and ruined by the French revolution and the Terror, inspired by the splendid and triumphant military despotism, contributed together to keep the public mind in a weak and supine state, which the sound of the cannon alone interrupted. I am wrong; the great men, naturalists or mathematicians, who had sprung up, either young or already ripe, in the era of the French revolution--Laplace, La Grange, Cuvier--upheld, in the order of their studies, that scientific superiority of France which has not always kept pace with literary genius, but which has never ceased to adorn our country. The personal tastes of the emperor served and encouraged the learned men, even when their opinions had remained more independent than suited him. He sometimes reproached Monge, his companion during the campaign of Egypt, that he had remained in his heart attached to the Republic. "Well, but!" said the great geometrician, gayly, "your Majesty turned so short!"