Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/275

Rh discourses of the rhetoricians had maintained him; in order to carry out designs which were unworthy and shameful, these gentry resort to sonorous words to lull a careless people to security; and when the nation awakens and finds herself rolling into the abyss, she cries out treason but is unable to distinguish the traitors. So Sully-Prudhomme had detested war and shown himself rather disdainful of soldiers. Then he learned from his own experience that any one who chooses can not be a soldier, that it is one thing to deliver philosophic harangues and another to submit one's physical and moral being to monotonous regulations and entire self-effacement; he learned—and the lesson cost him dear—that in order to possess the right to think, one must have conquered first the right to live; that it is folly which would be ridiculous if it did not bring such despair to profess humanitarianism when all of Europe is under arms; and that, however inelegant the solution may appear, there is but one, if a people intends to maintain its nationality, guard its independence, continue its race, possess its territory, speak its language—and the solution is to be strong enough to defend them.

You lived your life, sir, under the yoke of the victorious enemy. It was in a city occupied by the Germans that you resumed and continued your studies. You were thoroughly successful in them; but the joy was doubled for you by the fact that your public success coincided with the evacuation of Nancy. As our dear late colleague Émile Gebhart has told us, it was in a hall filled with the joy of deliverance that you received your last scholastic honors. You held the first rank, a native of the city and ten times a prize-winner. You carried off the prize in mathematics from all your rivals, from Paris and the departments; it depended on you alone to enter the School of Forestry second on the list of appointees; this would have been another glory for Nancy, but you refused to go further with the school than to leave your visiting-card; you were distrustful of the fallacious dryads who delight in troubling the absent-minded.

The next year you presented yourself as a candidate at the École Polytechnique and at the same time at the École Normale; for the latter you stood number five, for the former number one. Which of the two great schools would you choose? That which decided your choice, more even than the familiar memories, than the temptation of the uniform and the glory of the sergeant-major's chevrons, was it not, tell us, the groaning of the mutilated fatherland? But you never reached the point of entering upon a military career. Your scientific bent showed itself so brilliantly at the school that there was no question of another sort of glory; your residence there is a matter of piously transmitted tradition. It is related that you attended your classes, at least in mathematics, without taking a note, without reading or even collecting the mimeographed sheets which reproduce the professor's lecture. Your method