Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/127

Rh all this. The Bourbons reestablished upon the throne, General Carnot was proscribed, and Sadi was sent successively to several forts as engineer, to count bricks, to repair walls and to draw up plans destined to lie buried in the official archives. However, he worked conscientiously, although his name, which but now had won for him so many official pleasantries, served to retard his due advancement for some time. In 1819, desiring greater leisure for private study, Carnot presented himself as a candidate for a new staff-corps then forming, and received an appointment as lieutenant on the general staff. His duties brought him to Paris and the surrounding country, and he led a studious life, interrupted but once by several happy months spent with his brother and exiled father at Magdeburg.

He followed original lines in all his work, and was a constant enemy to the traditional and conventional. Upon his table were found only Pascal, Molière or La Fontaine, and he knew these favorites by heart. With him music was a passion inherited from his mother; not content in attaining a superb execution on the violin, he must needs plunge into the study of theory. His insatiable intelligence led him to follow assiduously courses at the Collège de France, at the Sorbonne and at the École des Mines. He visited manufacturing plants and familiarized himself with the different processes. Mathematical sciences, natural history, industrial arts, political economy, all these were cultivated with ardor. Not only did he indulge in gymnastic exercises, but he investigated the theory of fencing, swimming, dancing and skating.

Toward the end of 1826 he requested and obtained his return to the corps of engineers, receiving by reason of seniority the rank of captain. However, military service was onerous to him, jealous as he was of his liberty, and in 1828 he resigned in order to devote himself more fully to science.

His manuscript notes show that he had perceived the relation which is believed to exist between heat and mechanical work; and after having established the principle which now bears his name, he began researches which would have established with surety the principle of equivalence of mechanical energy and heat had they not been suddenly interrupted by his enthusiastic participation in the revolution of 1830.

An anecdote which shows his impetuous nature as a man, even as we have seen it exhibited as a child, is also given us by his brother. On the day of the funeral of General Lamarque, Carnot was strolling for curiosity's sake in the neighborhood of the insurrection. A cavalier who headed a charge and who appeared intoxicated passed down the street at a gallop, flourishing his saber and striking the pedestrians. Carnot rushed forward nimbly avoiding the soldier's sword, seized him