ry or naval engineering, artillery,
or staff duty, or the civil engineering of mining, and _ponts et
chaussees_.[*] By your advice, I chose the latter.

[*] Department of the government including everything connected
with the making and repairing of roads, bridges, canals, etc.

But where I triumphed how many others fail! Do you know that from
year to year the State increases the scientific requirements of
the Ecole? the studies are more severe, more exacting yearly. The
preparatory studies which tried me so much were nothing to the
intense work of the school itself, which has for its object to put
the whole of physical science, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry,
and all their nomenclatures into the minds of young men of
nineteen to twenty-one years of age. The State, which seems in
France to wish to substitute itself in many ways for the paternal
authority, has neither bowels of compassion nor fatherhood; it
makes its experiments _in anima vili_. Never does it inquire into
the horrible statistics of the suffering it causes. Does it know
the number of brain fevers among its pupils during the last
thirty-six years; or the despair and the moral destruction which
decimate its youth? I am pointing out to you this painful side of
the State education, for it is one of the anterior contingents of
the actual result.

You know that scholars whose conceptions are slow, or who are
temporarily disabled from excess of mental work, are allowed to
remain at the Ecole three years instead of two; they then become
the object of suspicions little favorable to their capacity. This
often compels young men, who might later show superior capacity,
to leave the school without being employed, simply because they
could not meet the final examination with the full scientific
knowledge required. They are called "dried fruits"; Napoleon made
sub-lieutenants of them. To-day the "dried fruits" constitute an
enormous loss of capital to families and of time to individuals.

However, as I say, I triumphed. At twenty-one years of age I knew
the mathematical sciences up to the point to which so many men of
genius have brought them, and I was impatient to distinguish
myself by carrying them further. This desire is so natural that
almost every pupil leaving the Ecole fixes his eyes on that moral
sun called Fame. The first thought of all is to become another
Newton, or Lapla