EVARISTE GALOIS 



85 



leader of liberalism in Bourg-la-Reine, and during the Hundred 

 Days had been appointed its mayor. Strangely enough, after 

 Waterloo he was still the mayor of the village. He took his oath 

 to the King, and to be sure he kept it, yet he remained a liberal to 

 the end of his days. One of his friends and neighbours, Thomas 

 Francois Demante, a lawyer and judge, onetime professor in the 

 Faculty of Law of Paris, was also a typical gentleman of the 

 "ancien regime/' but of a different style. He had given a very 

 solid classical education not only to his sons but also to his 

 daughters. None of these had been more deeply imbued with the 

 examples of antiquity than Adelaide-Marie who was to be 

 Evariste's mother. Roman stoicism had sunk deep into her heart 

 and given to it a virile temper. She was a good Christian, though 

 more concerned with the ethical than with the mystical side of 

 religion. An ardent imagination had colored her every virtue with 

 passion. Many more people have been able to appreciate her char- 

 acter than her son's, for it was to be her sad fortune to survive him 

 forty years. She was said to be generous to a fault and original to 

 the point of queerness. There is no doubt that Evariste owed con- 

 siderably more to her than to his father. Besides, until the age of 

 eleven the little boy had no teacher but his mother. 



In 1823, Evariste was sent to college in Paris. This college — 

 Louis-le-Grand — was then a gloomy house, looking from the out- 

 side like a prison, but within aflame with life and passion. For 

 heroic memories of the Revolution and the Empire had remained 

 particularly vivid in this institution, which was indeed, under the 

 clerical and reactionary regime of the Restoration, a hot-bed of 

 liberalism. Love of learning and contempt of the Bourbons divided 

 the hearts of the scholars. Since 1815 the discipline had been 

 jeopardized over and over again by boyish rebellions, and Evariste 

 was certainly a witness of, if not a partner in, those which took 

 place soon after his arrival. The influence of such an impassioned 

 atmosphere upon a lad freshly emancipated from his mother's care 

 cannot be exaggerated. Nothing is more infectious than political 



