Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/272

268 Your grandfather was a pharmacist; it was at Nancy, in his house, opposite the ducal palace, that you came into the world; and this house, solid, massive and without ornament, is entered through an almost monumental portal whose worm-eaten posts support a broken pediment bearing the semblance of a boiling pot. Some found a bit of symbolism: the portal is poetry; the house is prose; it gives an impression of bourgeois simplicity and of settled living which is by no means trivial. Your father, a physician, was a conscientious student, a distinguished practitioner; and the faculty of Nancy, where he took his course, considered him a master of whom they were justly proud, at the same time that the working population saluted in him their benefactor. He was one of those men who, having been led by a noble curiosity into the most emotional and uncertain of professions, practise it with admirable disinterestedness and hold themselves amply repaid if they are so fortunate as to save a human life now and then. For the honor of the nation, there are many of the sort in France; but few have been able, like Dr. Poincaré, to discharge the duties of so absorbing a profession, to work in the laboratory, to teach assiduously, and at the same time to travel extensively over Europe.

Your mother was one of those alert, active women, always in motion and always busy, whose spirit of order, organization and command rules a household. She also was a native of Lorraine, of an old local family, home-loving, attached and riveted to the soil; the boys, no matter how brilliantly they had begun life, were never easy till they had returned to the home-nest to live, hunting on their estates or supervising their cultivation; two of your great-uncles joined to their rural tastes an inclination for geometry. Your mother wasted no time on such matters, finding enough to busy her in those occupations which are duties, and which, cheerfully accepted as such, become pleasures. Ah! what admirable sources of vital energy are these Frenchwomen, honest and shrewd, economical and judicious, sovereign in their own domain and disdainful of the other conquests, constantly busy at reforming the national virtue and transmitting intelligent patriotism to their children!. . . In your home you found an uncle recently graduated from the École Polytechnique. What a prestige surrounds these young men who, by a mental effort which is sometimes excessive, succeed in obtaining the first places in their generation, and to how many mistaken choices of vocation does their example lead! But with you, sir, the vocation had nothing to do with example; you were predestined to mathematics! This aptitude, in your paternal and maternal family, is transmitted in collateral lines like the throne in the House of Osman, and yourself twice heir of avuncular gifts, I am told that you have selected one of your own nephews for the precious succession.

You did not wait long to reveal your vocation, and you are justly