2. Dated by a number of clues. The Société royale de médecine met on Tuesday, Aug. 31; see Vicq d’Azyr’s letter of Aug. 21. The Académie des sciences met bi-weekly, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. In this letter Le Roy implies that he will be making a presentation at the next day’s meeting. The presentation may have been postponed one session; the following Saturday, Sept. 4, he reported to the Académie on his dispute with the abbé Rochon over the lightning rods at the château de la Muette, in Passy, where the abbé was garde du cabinet de physique et d’optique du roi. It was decided that a committee of five, BF among them, would make an on-site inspection and settle the dispute. Procès-verbaux, XCVIII, 276. The third clue, which argues for the summer of 1779, is the word “circonspection,” a reference to “The Morals of Chess” which BF had written for his Passy friends at the end of June.

3. Another Le Roy letter, dated simply “mardy matin,” may well belong to the summer of 1779. The writer expresses his regrets for having spent so little time in Passy and having enjoyed BF’s voisinage so little this summer, but he has been kept in Paris by a variety of circumstances. He has not yet located the paper that BF requested but will keep searching through his files. He thanks BF for having returned a number (but not quite all) of his books. APS.