To Monsieur Grossetete:
Monsieur,--You have been to me a father when you might have been
only a mere protector, and therefore I venture to make you a
rather sad confidence. It is to you alone, you who have made me
what I am, that I can tell my troubles.
I am afflicted with a terrible malady, a cruel moral malady. In my
soul are feelings and in my mind convictions which make me utterly
unfit for what the State and society demand of me. This may seem
to you ingratitude; it is only the statement of a condition. When
I was twelve years old you, my generous god-father, saw in me, the
son of a mere workman, an aptitude for the exact sciences and a
precocious desire to rise in life. You favored my impulse toward
better things when my natural fate was to stay a carpenter like my
father, who, poor man, did not live long enough to enjoy my
advancement. Indeed, monsieur, you did a good thing, and there is
never a day that I do not bless you for it. It may be that I am
now to blame; but whether I am right or wrong it is very certain
that I suffer. In making my complaint to you I feel that I take
you as my judge like God Himself. Will you listen to my story and
grant me your indulgence?
Between sixteen and eighteen years of age I gave myself to the
study of the exact sciences with an ardor, you remember, that made
me ill. My future depended on my admission to the Ecole
Polytechnique. At that time my studies overworked my brain, and I
came near dying; I studied night and day; I did more than the
nature of my organs permitted. I wanted to pass such satisfying
examinations that my place in the Ecole would be not only secure,
but sufficiently advanced to release me from the cost of my
support, which I did not want you to pay any longer.
I triumphed! I tremble to-day as I think of the frightful
conscription (if I may so call it) of brains delivered over yearly
to the State by family ambition. By insisting on these severe
studies at the moment when a youth attains his various forms of
growth, the authorities produce secret evils and kill by midnight
study many precious faculties which later would have developed
both strength and grandeur. The laws of nature are relentless;
they do not yield in any particular to the enterprises or the
wishes of society. In the moral order as in the natural order all
abuses must be paid for; fruits forced in a hot-house are produced
at the tree’s expense and often at the sacrifice of the goodness
of its product. La Quintinie killed the orange-trees to give Louis
XIV. a bunch of flowers every day at all seasons. So it is with
intellects. The strain upon adolescent brains discounts their
future.
That which is chiefly wanting to our epoch is legislative genius.
Europe has had no true legislators since Jesus Christ, who, not
having given to the world a political code, left his work
incomplete. Before establishing great schools of specialists and
regulating the method of recruiting for them, where were the great
thinkers who could bear in mind the relation of such institutions
to human powers, balancing advantages and injuries, and studying
the past for the laws of the future? What inquiry has been made as
to the condition of exceptional men, who, by some fatal chance,
knew human sciences before their time? Has the rarity of such
cases been reckoned--the result examined? Has any enquiry been
made as to the means by which such men were enabled to endure the
perpetual strain of thought? How many, like Pascal, died
prematurely, worn-out by knowledge? Have statistics been gathered
as to the age at which those men who lived the longest began their
studies? Who has ever known, does any one know now, the interior
construction of brains which have been able to sustain a premature
burden of human knowledge? Who suspects that this question
belongs, above all, to the physiology of man?
For my part, I now believe the true general law is to remain a
long time in the vegetative condition of adolescence; and that
those exceptions where strength of organs is produced during
adolescence result usually in the shortening of life. Thus the
man of genius who is able to bear up under the precocious exercise
of his faculties is an exception to an exception.
If I am right, if what I say accords with social facts and medical
observations, then the system practised in France in her technical
schools is a fatal impairment and mutilation (in the style of La
Quintinie) practised upon the noblest flower of youth in each
generation.
But it is better to continue my history, and add my doubts as the
facts develop themselves.
When I entered the Ecole Polytechnique, I worked harder than ever
and with even more ardor, in order to leave it as triumphantly as
I had entered it. From nineteen to twenty-one I developed every
aptitude and strengthened every faculty by constant practice.
Those two years were the crown and completion of the first three,
during which I had only prepared myself to do well. Therefore my
pride was great when I won the right to choose the career that
pleased me most,--either military or naval engineering, artillery,
or staff duty, or the civil engineering of mining, and _ponts et
chaussees_.[*] By your advice, I chose the latter.
[*] Department of the government including everything connected
with the making and repairing of roads, bridges, canals, etc.
But where I triumphed how many others fail! Do you know that from
year to year the State increases the scientific requirements of
the Ecole? the studies are more severe, more exacting yearly. The
preparatory studies which tried me so much were nothing to the
intense work of the school itself, which has for its object to put
the whole of physical science, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry,
and all their nomenclatures into the minds of young men of
nineteen to twenty-one years of age. The State, which seems in
France to wish to substitute itself in many ways for the paternal
authority, has neither bowels of compassion nor fatherhood; it
makes its experiments _in anima vili_. Never does it inquire into
the horrible statistics of the suffering it causes. Does it know
the number of brain fevers among its pupils during the last
thirty-six years; or the despair and the moral destruction which
decimate its youth? I am pointing out to you this painful side of
the State education, for it is one of the anterior contingents of
the actual result.
You know that scholars whose conceptions are slow, or who are
temporarily disabled from excess of mental work, are allowed to
remain at the Ecole three years instead of two; they then become
the object of suspicions little favorable to their capacity. This
often compels young men, who might later show superior capacity,
to leave the school without being employed, simply because they
could not meet the final examination with the full scientific
knowledge required. They are called “dried fruits”; Napoleon made
sub-lieutenants of them. To-day the “dried fruits” constitute an
enormous loss of capital to families and of time to individuals.
However, as I say, I triumphed. At twenty-one years of age I knew
the mathematical sciences up to the point to which so many men of
genius have brought them, and I was impatient to distinguish
myself by carrying them further. This desire is so natural that
almost every pupil leaving the Ecole fixes his eyes on that moral
sun called Fame. The first thought of all is to become another
Newton, or Laplace, or Vauban. Such are the efforts that France
demands of the young men who leave her celebrated school.
Now let us see the fate of these men culled with so much care from
each generation. At one-and-twenty we dream of life, and expect
marvels of it. I entered the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees; I was a
pupil-engineer. I studied the science of construction, and how
ardently! I am sure you remember that. I left the school in 1827,
being then twenty-four years of age, still only a candidate as
engineer, and the government paid me one hundred and fifty francs
a month; the commonest book-keeper in Paris earns that by the time
he is eighteen, giving little more than four hours a day to his
work.
By a most unusual piece of luck, perhaps because of the
distinction my devoted studies won for me, I was made, in 1828,
when I was twenty-five years old, engineer-in-ordinary. I was
sent, as you know, to a sub-prefecture, with a salary of
twenty-five hundred francs. The question of money is nothing.
Certainly my fate has been more brilliant than the son of a
carpenter might expect; but where will you find a grocer’s boy,
who, if thrown into a shop at sixteen, will not in ten years be
on the high-road to an independent property?
I learned then to what these terrible efforts of mental power,
these gigantic exertions demanded by the State were to lead. The
State now employed me to count and measure pavements and heaps of
stones on the roadways; I had to keep in order, repair, and
sometimes construct culverts, one-arched bridges, regulate
drift-ways, clean and sometimes open ditches, lay out bounds, and
answer questions about the planting and felling of trees. Such are
the principal and sometimes the only occupations of ordinary
engineers, together with a little levelling which the government
obliges us to do ourselves, though any of our chain-bearers with
their limited experience can do it better than we with all our
science.
There are nearly four hundred engineers-in-ordinary and pupil
engineers; and as there are not more than a hundred or so of
engineers-in-chief, only a limited number of the sub-engineers can
hope to rise. Besides, above the grade of engineer-in-chief, there
is no absorbent class; for we cannot count as a means of
absorption the ten or fifteen places of inspector-generals or
divisionaries,--posts that are almost as useless in our corps as
colonels are in the artillery, where the battery is the essential
thing. The engineer-in-ordinary, like the captain of artillery,
knows the whole science. He ought not to have any one over him
except an administrative head to whom no more than eighty-six
engineers should report,--for one engineer, with two assistants is
enough for a department.
The present hierarchy in these bodies results in the subordination
of active energetic capacities to the worn-out capacities of old
men, who, thinking they know best, alter or nullify the plans
submitted by their subordinates,--perhaps with the sole aim of
making their existence felt; for that seems to me the only
influence exercised over the public works of France by the
Council-general of the _Ponts et Chaussees_.
Suppose, however, that I become, between thirty and forty years of
age, an engineer of the first-class and an engineer-in-chief
before I am fifty. Alas! I see my future; it is written before my
eyes. Here is a forecast of it:--
My present engineer-in-chief is sixty years old; he issued with
honors, as I did, from the famous Ecole; he has turned gray doing
in two departments what I am doing now, and he has become the most
ordinary man it is possible to imagine; he has fallen from the
height to which he had really risen; far worse, he is no longer on
the level of scientific knowledge; science has progressed, he has
stayed where he was. The man who came forth ready for life at
twenty-two years of age, with every sign of superiority, has
nothing left to-day but the reputation of it. In the beginning,
with his mind specially turned to the exact sciences and
mathematics by his education, he neglected everything that was not
his specialty; and you can hardly imagine his present dulness in
all other branches of human knowledge. I hardly dare confide even
to you the secrets of his incapacity sheltered by the fact that he
was educated at the Ecole Polytechnique. With that label attached
to him and on the faith of that prestige, no one dreams of
doubting his ability. To you alone do I dare reveal the fact that
the dulling of all his talents has led him to spend a million on a
single matter which ought not to have cost the administration more
than two hundred thousand francs. I wished to protest, and was
about to inform the prefect; but an engineer I know very well
reminded me of one of our comrades who was hated by the
administration for doing that very thing. “How would you like,” he
said to me, “when you get to be engineer-in-chief to have your
errors dragged forth by your subordinate? Before long your
engineer-in-chief will be made a divisional inspector. As soon as
any one of us commits a serious blunder, as he has done, the
administration (which can’t allow itself to appear in the wrong)
will quietly retire him from active duty by making him inspector.”
That’s how the reward of merit devolves on incapacity. All France
knew of the disaster which happened in the heart of Paris to the
first suspension bridge built by an engineer, a member of the
Academy of Sciences; a melancholy collapse caused by blunders such
as none of the ancient engineers--the man who cut the canal at
Briare in Henri IV.’s time, or the monk who built the Pont Royal
--would have made; but our administration consoled its engineer
for his blunder by making him a member of the Council-general.
Are the technical schools vast manufactories of incapables? That
subject requires careful investigation. If I am right they need
reforming, at any rate in their method of proceeding,--for I am
not, of course, doubting the utility of such schools. Only, when
we look back into the past we see that France in former days never
wanted for the great talents necessary to the State; but now she
prefers to hatch out talent geometrically, after the theory of
Monge. Did Vauban ever go to any other Ecole than that great
school we call vocation? Who was Riquet’s tutor? When great
geniuses arise above the social mass, impelled by vocation, they
are nearly always rounded into completeness; the man is then not
merely a specialist, he has the gift of universality. Do you think
that an engineer from the Ecole Polytechnique could ever create
one of those miracles of architecture such as Leonardo da Vinci
knew how to build,--mechanician, architect, painter, inventor of
hydraulics, indefatigable constructor of canals that he was?
Trained from their earliest years to the baldness of axiom and
formula, the youths who leave the Ecole have lost the sense of
elegance and ornament; a column seems to them useless; they return
to the point where art begins, and cling to the useful.
But all this is nothing in comparison to the real malady which is
undermining me. I feel an awful transformation going on within me;
I am conscious that my powers and my faculties, formerly
unnaturally taxed, are giving way. I am letting the prosaic
influence of my life get hold of me. I who, by the very nature of
my efforts, looked to do some great thing, I am face to face with
none but petty ones; I measure stones, I inspect roads, I have not
enough to really occupy me for two hours in my day. I see my
colleagues marry, and fall into a situation contrary to the spirit
of modern society. I wanted to be useful to my country. Is my
ambition an unreasonable one? The country asked me to put forth
all my powers; it told me to become a representative of science;
yet here I am with folded arms in the depths of the provinces. I
am not even allowed to leave the locality in which I am penned, to
exercise my faculties in planning useful enterprises. A hidden but
very real disfavor is the certain reward of any one of us who
yields to an inspiration and goes beyond the special service laid
down for him.
No, the favor a superior man has to hope for in that case is that
his talent and his presumption may not be noticed, and that his
project may be buried in the archives of the administration. What
think you will be the reward of Vicat, the one among us who has
brought about the only real progress in the practical science of
construction? The Council-general of the _Ponts et Chaussees_,
composed in part of men worn-out by long and sometimes honorable
service, but whose only remaining force is for negation, and who
set aside everything they no longer comprehend, is the
extinguisher used to snuff out the projects of audacious spirits.
This Council seems to have been created to paralyze the arm of
that glorious youth of France, which asks only to work and to be
useful to its country.
Monstrous things are done in Paris. The future of a province
depends on the mere signature of men who (through intrigues I have
no time to explain to you) often stop the execution of useful and
much-needed work; in fact, the best plans are often those which
offer most to the cupidity of commercial companies or speculators.
Another five years and I shall no longer be myself; my ambition
will be quenched, my desire to use the faculties my country
ordered me to exercise gone forever; the faculties themselves are
rusting out in the miserable corner of the world in which I
vegetate. Taking my chances at their best, the future seems to me
a poor thing. I have just taken advantage of a furlough to come to
Paris; I mean to change my profession and find some other way to
put my energy, my knowledge, and my activity to use. I shall send
in my resignation and go to some other country, where men of my
special capacity are wanted.
If I find I cannot do this, then I shall throw myself into the
struggle of the new doctrines, which certainly seem calculated to
produce great changes in the present social order by judiciously
guiding the working-classes. What are we now but workers without
work, tools on the shelves of a shop? We are trained and organized
as if to move the world, and nothing is given us to do. I feel
within me some great thing, which is decreasing daily, and will
soon vanish; I tell you so with mathematical frankness. Before
making the change I want your advice; I look upon myself as your
child, and I will never take any important step without consulting
you, for your experience is equal to your kindness.
I know very well that the State, after obtaining a class of
trained men, cannot undertake for them alone great public works;
there are not three hundred bridges needed a year in all France;
the State can no more build great buildings for the fame of its
engineers than it can declare war merely to win battles and bring
to the front great generals; but, then, as men of genius have
never failed to present themselves when the occasion called for
them, springing from the crowd like Vauban, can there be any
greater proof of the uselessness of the present institution? Can’t
they see that when they have stimulated a man of talent by all
those preparations he will make a fierce struggle before he allows
himself to become a nonentity? Is this good policy on the part of
the State? On the contrary, is not the State lighting the fire of
ardent ambitions, which must find fuel somewhere.
Among the six hundred young men whom they put forth every year
there are exceptions,--men who resist what may be called their
demonetization. I know some myself, and if I could tell you their
struggles with men and things when armed with useful projects and
conceptions which might bring life and prosperity to the half-dead
provinces where the State has sent them, you would feel that a man
of power, a man of talent, a man whose nature is a miracle, is a
hundredfold more unfortunate and more to be pitied than the man
whose lower nature lets him submit to the shrinkage of his
faculties.
I have made up my mind, therefore, that I would rather direct some
commercial or industrial enterprise, and live on small means while
trying to solve some of the great problems still unknown to
industry and to society, than remain at my present post.
You will tell me, perhaps, that nothing hinders me from employing
the leisure that I certainly have in using my intellectual powers
and seeking in the stillness of this commonplace life the solution
of some problem useful to humanity. Ah! monsieur, don’t you know
the influence of the provinces,--the relaxing effect of a life
just busy enough to waste time on futile labor, and not enough to
use the rich resources our education has given us? Don’t think me,
my dear protector, eaten up by the desire to make a fortune, nor
even by an insensate desire for fame. I am too much of a
calculator not to know the nothingness of glory. Neither do I want
to marry; seeing the fate now before me, I think my existence a
melancholy gift to offer any woman. As for money, though I regard
it as one of the most powerful means given to social man to act
with, it is, after all, but a means.
I place my whole desire and happiness on the hope of being useful
to my country. My greatest pleasure would be to work in some
situation suited to my faculties. If in your region, or in the
circle of your acquaintances, you should hear of any enterprise
that needed the capacities you know me to possess, think of me; I
will wait six months for your answer before taking any step.
What I have written here, dear sir and friend, others think. I
have seen many of my classmates or older graduates caught like me
in the toils of some specialty,--geographical engineers,
captain-professors, captains of engineers, who will remain captains
all their lives, and now bitterly regret they did not enter active
service with the army. Reflecting on these miserable results, I
ask myself the following questions, and I would like your opinion
on them, assuring you that they are the fruit of long meditation,
clarified in the fires of suffering:--
What is the real object of the State? Does it truly seek to obtain
fine capacities? The system now pursued directly defeats that end;
it has crated the most thorough mediocrities that any government
hostile to superiority could desire. Does it wish to give a career
to its choice minds? As a matter of fact, it affords them the
meanest opportunities; there is not a man who has issued from the
Ecoles who does not bitterly regret, when he gets to be fifty or
sixty years of age, that he ever fell into the trap set for him by
the promises of the State. Does it seek to obtain men of genius?
What man of genius, what great talent have the schools produced
since 1790? If it had not been for Napoleon would Cachin, the man
of genius to whom France owes Cherbourg, have existed? Imperial
despotism brought him forward; the constitutional regime would
have smothered him. How many men from the Ecoles are to be found
in the Academy of Sciences? Possibly two or three. The man of
genius develops always outside of the technical schools. In the
sciences which those schools teach genius obeys only its own laws;
it will not develop except under conditions which man cannot
control; neither the State nor the science of mankind,
anthropology, understands them. Riquet, Perronet, Leonardo da
Vinci, Cachin, Palladio, Brunelleschi, Michel-Angelo, Bramante,
Vauban, Vicat, derive their genius from causes unobserved and
preparatory, which we call chance,--the pet word of fools. Never,
with or without schools, are mighty workmen such as these wanting
to their epoch.
Now comes the question, Does the State gain through these
institutions the better doing of its works of public utility, or
the cheaper doing of them? As for that, I answer that private
enterprises of a like kind get on very well without the help of
our engineers; and next, the government works are the most
extravagant in the world, and the additional cost of the vast
administrative staff of the _Ponts et Chaussees_ is immense. In
all other countries, in Germany, England, Italy, where
institutions like ours do not exist, works of this character are
better done and far less costly than in France. Those three
nations are remarkable for new and useful inventions in this line.
I know it is the fashion to say, in speaking of our Ecoles, that
all Europe envies them; but for the last fifteen years Europe,
which closely observes us, has not established others like them.
England, that clever calculator, has better schools among her
working population, from which come practical men who show their
genius the moment they rise from practice to theory. Stephenson
and MacAdam did not come from schools like ours.
But what is the good of talking? When a few young and able
engineers, full of ardor, solve, at the outset of their career,
the problem of maintaining the roads of France, which need some
hundred millions spent upon them every quarter of a century (and
which are now in a pitiable state), they gain nothing by making
known in reports and memoranda their intelligent knowledge; it is
immediately engulfed in the archives of the general Direction,--
that Parisian centre where everything enters and nothing issues;
where old men are jealous of young ones, and all the posts of
management are used to shelve old officers or men who have
blundered.
This is why, with a body of scientific men spread all over the
face of France and constituting a part of the administration,--a
body which ought to enlighten every region on the subject of its
resources,--this is why we are still discussing the practicability
of railroads while other countries are making theirs. If ever
France was to show the excellence of her institution of technical
schools, it should have been in this magnificent phase of public
works, which is destined to change the face of States and nations,
to double human life, and modify the laws of space and time.
Belgium, the United States of America, England, none of whom have
an Ecole Polytechnique, will be honeycombed with railroads when
French engineers are still surveying ours, and selfish interests,
hidden behind all projects, are hindering their execution.
Thus I say that as for the State, it derives no benefit from its
technical schools; as for the individual pupil of those schools,
his earnings are poor, his ambition crushed, and his life a cruel
deception. Most assuredly the powers he has displayed between
sixteen and twenty-six years of age would, if he had been cast
upon his own resources, have brought him more fame and more wealth
than the government in whom he trusted will ever give him. As a
commercial man, a learned man, a military man, this choice
intellect would have worked in a vast centre where his precious
faculties and his ardent ambition would not be idiotically and
prematurely repressed.
Where, then, is progress? Man and State are both kept backward by
this system. Does not the experience of a whole generation demand
a reform in the practical working of these institutions? The duty
of culling from all France during each generation the choice minds
destined to become the learned and the scientific of the nation is
a sacred office, the priests of which, the arbiters of so many
fates, should be trained by special study. Mathematical knowledge
is perhaps less necessary to them than physiological knowledge.
And do you not think that they need a little of that second-sight
which is the witchcraft of great men? As it is, the examiners are
former professors, honorable men grown old in harness, who limit
their work to selecting the best themes. They are unable to do
what is really demanded of them; and yet their functions are the
noblest in the State and demand extraordinary men.
Do not think, dear sir and friend, that I blame only the Ecole
itself; no, I blame the system by which it is recruited. This
system is the _concours_, competition,--a modern invention,
essentially bad; bad not only in science, but wherever it is
employed, in arts, in all selections of men, of projects, of
things. If it is a reproach to our great Ecoles that they have not
produced men superior to other educational establishments, it is
still more shameful that the _grand prix_ of the Institute has not
as yet furnished a single great painter, great musician, great
architect, great sculptor; just as the suffrage for the last
twenty years has not elected out of its tide of mediocrities a
single great statesman. My observation makes me detect, as I
think, an error which vitiates in France both education and
politics. It is a cruel error, and it rests on the following
principle, which organizers have misconceived:--
_Nothing, either in experience or in the nature of things, can
give a certainty that the intellectual qualities of the adult
youth will be those of the mature man._
At this moment I am intimate with a number of distinguished men
who concern themselves with all the moral maladies which are now
afflicting France. They see, as I do, that our highest education
is manufacturing temporary capacities,--temporary because they
are without exercise and without future; that such education is
without profit to the State because it is devoid of the vigor of
belief and feeling. Our whole system of public education needs
overhauling, and the work should be presided over by some man of
great knowledge, powerful will, and gifted with that legislative
genius which has never been met with among moderns, except perhaps
in Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Possibly our superfluous numbers might be employed in giving
elementary instruction so much needed by the people. The
deplorable amount of crime and misdemeanors shows a social disease
directly arising from the half-education given the masses, which
tends to the destruction of social ties by making the people
reflect just enough to desert the religious beliefs which are
favorable to social order, and not enough to lift them to the
theory of obedience and duty, which is the highest reach of the
new transcendental philosophy. But as it is impossible to make a
whole nation study Kant, therefore I say fixed beliefs and habits
are safer for the masses than shallow studies and reasoning.
If I had my life to begin over again, perhaps I would enter a
seminary and become a simple village priest, or the teacher of a
country district. But I am too far advanced in my profession now
to be a mere primary instructor; I can, if I leave my present
post, act in a wider range than that of a school or a country
parish. The Saint-Simonians, to whom I have been tempted to ally
myself, want now to take a course in which I cannot follow them.
Nevertheless, in spite of their mistakes, they have touched on
many of the sore spots which are the fruits of our present
legislation, and which the State will only doctor by insufficient
palliatives,--merely delaying in France the moral and political
crisis that must come.
Adieu, dear Monsieur Grossetete; accept the assurance of my
respectful attachment, which, notwithstanding all these
observations, can only increase.
Gregoire Gerard.
According to his old habit as a banker, Grossetete had jotted down his
reply on the back of the letter itself, heading it with the sacramental
word, _Answered_.
It is useless, my dear Gerard, to discuss the observations made in
your letter, because by a trick of chance (I use the term which
is, as you say, the pet word of fools) I have a proposal to make
to you which may result in withdrawing you from the situation you
find so bad. Madame Graslin, the owner of the forests of Montegnac
and of a barren plateau extending from the base of a chain of
mountains on which are the forests, wishes to improve this vast
domain, to clear her timber properly, and cultivate the stony
plain.
To put this project into execution she needs a man of your
scientific knowledge and ardor, and one who has also your
disinterested devotion and your ideas of practical utility. It
will be little money and much work! a great result from small
means! a whole region to be changed fundamentally! barren places
to be made to gush with plenty! Isn’t that precisely what you
want,--you who are dreaming of constructing a poem? From the tone
of sincerity which pervades your letter, I do not hesitate to bid
you come and see me at Limoges. But, my good friend, don’t send in
your resignation yet; get leave of absence only, and tell your
administration that you are going to study questions connected
with your profession outside of the government works. In this way,
you will not lose your rights, and you will have time to judge for
yourself whether the project conceived by the rector of Montegnac
and approved by Madame Graslin is feasible.
I will explain to you by word of mouth the advantages you will
find in case this great scheme can be carried out. Rely on the
friendship of
Yours, etc, T. Grossetete.
Madame Graslin replied to Grossetete in few words: “Thank you, my
friend; I shall expect your _protege_.” She showed the letter to the
rector, saying,--
“One more wounded man for the hospital.”
The rector read the letter, reread it, made two or three turns on the
terrace silently; then he gave it back to Madame Graslin, saying,--
“A fine soul, and a superior man. He says the schools invented by the
genius of the Revolution manufacture incapacities. For my part, I say
they manufacture unbelievers; for if Monsieur Gerard is not an atheist,
he is a protestant.”
“We will ask him,” she said, struck by an answer.