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from one form to another, yet it will not burst in and out of existence. This was one of the prime discoveries of the 1700s—on a level with Faraday's realizations about energy in the basement of the Royal Institution a half century later. Here too, it was as if God had created a universe, and then said, I am going to put a fixed amount of mass in my domain, I will let stars grow and explode, I will let mountains form and collide and be weathered away by wind and ice; I will let metals rust and crumble. Yet throughout this the total amount of mass in my universe will never alter; not even to the millionth of an ounce; not even if you wait for all eternity. If a city were to be weighed, and then broken by siege, and its buildings burned by fire—if all the smoke and ash and broken ramparts and bricks were collected and weighed, there would be no change in the original weight. Nothing would have truly vanished, not even the weight of the smallest speck of dust.
    To say that all physical objects have a property called their "mass," which affects how they move, is impressive, yet Newton had done it in the late 1600s. But to get enough detail to show exactly how their parts can combine or separate? That is the further step Lavoisier had now achieved.
    Whenever France's scientists make discoveries at this level, they're brought close to the government. It happened with Lavoisier. Could this oxygen he'd helped clarify be used to produce a better blast furnace? Lavoisier had been a member of the Academy of Sciences and now was given funds to help find out. Could the hydrogen he was teasing out from the air with his careful measurements be useful in supplying a flotilla of balloons, capable of competing with Britain for supremacy in the air? He got grants and contracts for that as well.
    In any other period this would have guaranteed the Lavoisiers an easy life. But all these grants and honors and awards were coming from the king, Louis XVI, and in a few years Louis would be murdered, along with his wife and many of his ministers and wealthy supporters.
    Lavoisier might have avoided being caught up with the other victims. The Revolution was only at its most lethal phases for a few months, and many of Louis' closest supporters simply lived out those periods in quiet. But Lavoisier could never drop the attitude of careful measuring. It was part of his personality as an accountant; it was the essence of his discoveries in science.
    Now it would kill him.
    The first mistake seemed innocuous enough. Outsiders constantly bothered members of the Academy of Sciences, and long before the Revolution, one of them, a Swiss-born doctor, had insisted that only the renowned Lavoisier would be wise enough, and understanding enough, to judge his new invention. The device was something of an early infrared scope, allowing the doctor to detect the shimmering heat waves rising from the top of a candle, or of a cannonball, or even—on one proud occasion, when he'd lured the American representative to his chambers—from the top of Benjamin Franklin's bald head. But Lavoisier and the Academy turned him down. From what Lavoisier had heard, the heat patterns that the doctor was searching for couldn't be measured with precision, and to Lavoisier that was anathema. But the Swiss-born hopeful—Dr. Jean-Paul Marat—never forgot.
    The next mistake was even more closely linked to Lavoisier's obsession with measurement. Louis XVI was helping America fund its revolutionary war against the British, an alliance that Benjamin Franklin had been central in sustaining. There were no bond markets, so to get the money Louis had to turn to the General Farm. But taxes already were high. Where could they go to get more?
    In every period of incompetent administration France has suffered—and Louis's successors in the 1930s would have given him a good run—there almost always has been a small group of technocrats who've decided that since no one who was officially in power