tortion.

The most sacred spot in Paris to young Foch, in all the depression he
found there, was undoubtedly the great Dome des Invalides, where,
bathed in an unearthly radiance and surrounded by faded battle flags,
lies the great porphyry sarcophagus of Napoleon I.

With what bitter reflections must the young man who had been nurtured
in the adoration of Bonaparte have returned from that majestic tomb to
the Polytechnic School for Warriors--to which, on the day after his
coronation as Emperor, Napoleon had given the following motto:

"Science and glory--all for country."

But, also, what must have been the young southerner's thought as he
lifted his gaze on entering the Polytechnic and read there that
self-same wish which was inscribed over the door of his first school in
Tarbes:

"May this house remain standing until the ant has drunk all the waves
of the sea and the tortoise has crawled round the world."

The edifice in which part of the Polytechnic was housed was the ancient
College of Navarre, and a Navarrias poet of lang syne had given to the
Paris school for his countrymen this quaint wish, repeated from the
inscription he knew at Tarbes.

France had had twelve different governments in fourscore years when
Ferdinand Foch came to study in that old building which had once been
the college of Navarre. Houses of cards rather than houses of
permanence seemed to characterize her.

Yet she has always had her quota--a larger one, too, than that of any
other country--of those who look toward far to-morrows and seek to
build substantially and beautifully for them.

That forward-looking prayer of old Navarre, and recollection of the
centuries during which it had prevailed against destroying forces, was
undoubtedly an aid and comfort to the heavy-hearted youth who then and
there set himself to the study of that art of war wherewith he was to
serve France.

Among the two hundred and odd fellow-students of Foch at the
Polytechnic was another young man from the south--almost a neighbor of
his and his junior by just three months--Jacques Joseph Cesaire Joffre,
who had entered the school in 1869, interrupted his studies to go to
war, and resumed them shortly before Ferdinand Foch entered the
Polytechnic.

Joffre graduated from the Polytechnic on September 21, 1872, and went
thence to the School of Applied Artillery at Fontainebleau.

Foch left the Polytechnic about six months later, and also went to
Fontainebleau