our comrades who was hated by the
administration for doing that very thing. "How would you like," he
said to me, "when you get to be engineer-in-chief to have your
errors dragged forth by your subordinate? Before long your
engineer-in-chief will be made a divisional inspector. As soon as
any one of us commits a serious blunder, as he has done, the
administration (which can't allow itself to appear in the wrong)
will quietly retire him from active duty by making him inspector."

That's how the reward of merit devolves on incapacity. All France
knew of the disaster which happened in the heart of Paris to the
first suspension bridge built by an engineer, a member of the
Academy of Sciences; a melancholy collapse caused by blunders such
as none of the ancient engineers--the man who cut the canal at
Briare in Henri IV.'s time, or the monk who built the Pont Royal
--would have made; but our administration consoled its engineer
for his blunder by making him a member of the Council-general.

Are the technical schools vast manufactories of incapables? That
subject requires careful investigation. If I am right they need
reforming, at any rate in their method of proceeding,--for I am
not, of course, doubting the utility of such schools. Only, when
we look back into the past we see that France in former days never
wanted for the great talents necessary to the State; but now she
prefers to hatch out talent geometrically, after the theory of
Monge. Did Vauban ever go to any other Ecole than that great
school we call vocation? Who was Riquet's tutor? When great
geniuses arise above the social mass, impelled by vocation, they
are nearly always rounded into completeness; the man is then not
merely a specialist, he has the gift of universality. Do you think
that an engineer from the Ecole Polytechnique could ever create
one of those miracles of architecture such as Leonardo da Vinci
knew how to build,--mechanician, architect, painter, inventor of
hydraulics, indefatigable constructor of canals that he was?

Trained from their earliest years to the baldness of axiom and
formula, the youths who leave the Ecole have lost the sense of
elegance and ornament; a column seems to them useless; they return
to the point where art begins, and cling to the useful.

But all this is nothing in comparison to the real malady which is
undermining me. I feel an awful transformati