erything connected with the sciences. His greatest
pleasure was to make experiments in physics or chemistry: he tried
everything which his imagination suggested. Once he happened to produce
a detonating mixture which made a formidable explosion, but nothing was
broken except a few windows."

His choice of reading revealed the same tendency. He was not fond of
reading, and only liked books of adventure which were food for his
warlike sentiments and his ideas of honor and honesty. He preferred the
works of Major Driant, and re-read them even during his mathematical
year. Returning from a walk one Thursday evening, he knocked on the
prefect's door to ask for a book. He wanted _La Guerre fatale_, _La
Guerre de Demain_, _L'Aviateur du Pacifique_, etc. "But you have already
read them." "That does not matter." Did he really re-read them? His
dreams were always the same, and his eyes looked into the future.

Somebody, however, was to exert over this impressionable, mobile, almost
too ardent nature, an influence which was to determine its direction.
His father had advised him to choose his friends with care, and not
yield himself to the first comer. He was not only incapable of doing
that, but equally incapable of yielding himself to anybody. Do we really
choose our friends in early life? We only know our friends by finding
them in our lives when we need them. They are there, but we have not
sought them. A similarity of taste, of sensibility, of ambitions draw us
to them, and they have been our friends a long time already before we
perceive that they are not merely comrades. Thus Jean Krebs became the
constant companion of Georges Guynemer. The father of Jean Krebs is that
Colonel Krebs whose name is connected with the first progress made in
aerostation and aviation. He was then director of the Panhard factories,
and his two sons were students at Stanislas. Jean, the elder, was
Guynemer's classmate. He was a silent, self-centered, thoughtful
student, calm in speech and facial expression, never speaking one word
louder than another, and the farthest possible removed from anything
noisy or agitated. Georges broke in upon his solitude and attached
himself to him, while Krebs endured, smiled, and accepted, and they
became allies. It was Krebs, for the time, who was the authority, the
one who had prestige and wore the halo. Why, he knew what an automobile
was, and one Sunday he took his friend Georges to Ivry and taught him
how to d