The Village Rector, Honoré de Balzac [best historical biographies .txt] 📗

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,