The invention of ballooning facilitated a grand, if sometimes grandiloquent, outpouring of laudatory poetry and prose proclaiming the ‘sublime invention’ and the ‘philosophical phenomenon’ as the greatest wonder of the current age. If the century of Louis XIV had been destined to ‘perfect the arts and letters’, wrote one anonymous commentator, then it was reserved for the age of Louis XVI to witness ‘the grand discoveries in the high sciences’. As Jean Sgard has noted, ‘hot-air balloons imposed themselves from their creation as an emblem of the Enlightenment’. Balloons, however, offered the Age of Reason an ambiguous symbol at best. Horace Walpole, for example, lamented that no matter what happened with balloons, posterity would laugh at him and his contemporaries. ‘If half a dozen [balloonists] break their necks, and balloonism is exploded, we shall be called fools for having imagined it could be brought to use: if it should be turned to account, we shall be ridiculed for having doubted’. An anonymously published letter addressed to the Marquis de Saint-Just related aeronautics to a number of positive aspects associated with the progress of society: these included the reign of philosophy, the elimination of prejudice and superstition, the abolition of slavery in many of the countries of Europe, the creation of a grand empire in America, and the suppression of the Jesuits by the Pope.