After the death of Frederick the Great, men of science were no longer respected in Germany, and Lagrange accepted an invitation of Louis XVI. to migrate to Paris. The French queen treated him with regard, and lodging was procured for him in the Louvre. But he was seized with a long attack of melancholy which destroyed his taste for mathematics. For two years his printed copy of the Mécanique, fresh from the press,—the work of a quarter of a century,—lay unopened on his desk. Through Lavoisier he became interested in chemistry, which he found "as easy as algebra." The disastrous crisis of the French Revolution aroused him again to activity. About this time the young and accomplished daughter of the astronomer Lemonnier took compassion on the sad, lonely Lagrange, and insisted upon marrying him. Her devotion to him constituted the one tie to life which at the approach of death he found it hard to break.
He was made one of the commissioners to establish weights and measures having units founded on nature. Lagrange strongly favoured the decimal subdivision, the general idea of which was obtained from a work of Thomas Williams, London, 1788. Such was the moderation of Lagrange's character, and such the universal respect for him, that he was retained as president of the commission on weights and measures even after it had been purified by the Jacobins by striking out the names of Lavoisier, Laplace, and others. Lagrange took alarm at the fate of Lavoisier, and planned to return to Berlin, but at the establishment of the École Normale in 1795 in Paris, he was induced to accept a professorship. Scarcely had he time to elucidate the foundations of arithmetic and algebra to young pupils, when the school was closed. His additions to the algebra of Euler were prepared at this time. In 1797 the École Polytechnique was founded, with Lagrange as one of the professors. The earliest triumph of this institution was
