The queen was playing cards at Versailles.

"What I win this game shall go to Blanchard," she said.

The same feat, attempted a few days later by a professor of physics, M.Pilatre de Rozier, was destined to cost him his life.
So many scientific explorations, so many new discoveries of nature's secrets were seconded and celebrated by an analogous movement in literature.

Rousseau had led the way to impassioned admiration of the beauties of nature; Bernardin de St.Pierre had just published his _Etudes de la Nature;_ he had in the press his _Paul et Virginie;_ Abbe Delille was reading his _Jardin,_ and M.de St.Lambert his _Saisons_.
In their different phases and according to their special instincts, all minds, scholarly or political, literary or philosophical, were tending to the same end, and pursuing the same attempt.

It was nature which men wanted to discover or recover: scientific laws and natural rights divided men's souls between them.