The winds would blow it to the goal of our desires.
We do not know if the fire balloon came down in the park of Versailles. But we do know the names of the physicist and the poet of Juilly. The physicist was Father Fouché, and the poet was Father Billaud (Billaud-Varennes). Arnault remarks in this connection: "Ten years afterward, they showed themselves less gracious toward the monarch."
Father Billaud, good Father Billaud, as he was called at Juilly, was a young man of twenty-one years. He was the son of a lawyer of La Rochelle who had neither fortune nor clients. He had scarcely left college when he abducted a young girl and then became a member of a troupe of comedians. He was a failure on the stage and returned to La Rochelle. There he put on the stage a satirical comedy: La Femme comme il n'y en a plus, in which he defamed all the women of his town. It was hissed off the boards and he had to flee to Paris. As he was penniless, he entered the Oratory; and, as the Oratory needed regents for its colleges, they sent him to Juilly as prefect of studies. His pupils loved his good fellowship. But his superiors had very quickly seen what was under the mask. "Billaud—To judge by the way in which he reads Latin, he does not know it very well. Has he brains? I have not had sufficient time to find out. But he has a high opinion of himself, and I regard him as only a worldly man, clothed in the habit of the Oratory, coolly regular and honest, who has tried hard not to compromise himself in the last few? months, for when he first came here his behavior was not of the best. Though he may be judicious in his conduct, I do not think that he is suited to the Oratory, because of his age, of what he has been, and of what he is." Such was the judgment passed upon him by his superior, for the Superior General of the congregation, in 1784. Shortly afterward it was learned that Father Billaud had offered a tragedy to the comedian Larive: he was expelled.... We know what followed: his entry of the bar at Paris, his marriage to the natural daughter of a farmer-general, his friendship with Marat and Robespierre, his complicity in the massacres of September, his ferocities and cowardices, his turnabout on the ninth of Thermidor, his banishment to Guiana, his escape, his death in San Domingo. He ended his career as a teacher of parrots.
Was good Father Billaud of Juilly a hypocrite? Did he already dissimulate under the appearance of cold regularity the wild passions of the Jacobin of '93.... I prefer the explanation of Arnault who, decidedly, does not lack judgment: "Father Billaud, who later became so frightfully famous under the name of Billaud-Varennes, also appeared to be a very good man at that time, and perhaps he was so; perhaps he would even have been so all his life, if he had remained a private citizen, if the events which provoked the development of his atrocious policy and the application of his frightful theories had never presented themselves. I would prefer to believe that morally, as physically, we all carry in ourselves the germs of more than one grave malady, from which we seem to be exempt as long as we do not meet the circumstance which is capable of provoking the explosion." Father Fouché, professor of physics, was a year older than Father Billaud. He also passed at Juilly as a good fellow, and interested his pupils by showing them spectacular physical experiments. He, however, did not enter the Oratory from necessity or caprice. He was brought up by the Oratorists of Nantes, and had come to the institution at Paris with the intention of devoting himself to the teaching of science. He had no bent for theology, but was fond of studying Horace, Tacitus and Euclid's Commentaries. He was soon to abandon Euclid; but he did not forget the examples of perfect wickedness which were presented to him by Tacitus, and he served the Terror, the Directory and Napoleon with the cold infamy of a freedman; as for Horace, he was never faithless to him, for he had a taste for gardens and for friendship.
He was regent at Vendôme, then at Juilly, then at Arras, where he made the acquaintance of Robespierre. He was prefect of studies at Nantes when the Revolution threw him into public life.
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He never forgot Juilly. Perhaps some of the verses of Horace were associated in his mind with the memory of the trees of the park and the waters of the pool.... In 1802, when he was Minister of the General Police, he wished to come to visit his old college, he who, in the time of the Terror, in the Nièvre and at Lyons, had added to the most frightful massacres the most childish sacrilege. Events then passed easily over the imagination of men, and even more quickly over the imagination of a Fouché. An ex-Oratorist, Father Dotte-ville, accompanied him to Juilly. The pupils received the visitors by singing verses of their own composition:
Leaving, to revisit your friends,