88 THE LIFE OF SCIENCE 



torment his masters and get himself harassed with punishments. 

 He does not lack religious feeling; his health seems weak. 



Later still : 



Bad conduct, character difficult to define. Aims at originality. 

 His talents are very distinguished; he might have done very well 

 in "Rhetorique" if he had been willing to work, but swayed by 

 his passion for mathematics, he has entirely neglected everything 

 else. Hence he has made no progress whatever. . . . Seems to 

 affect to do something different from what he should do. It is pos- 

 sibly to this purpose that he chatters so much. He protests against 

 silence. 



In his last year at the college, 1828-1829, he had at last found 

 a teacher of mathematics who divined his genius and tried to en- 

 courage and to help him. This Mr. Richard, to whom one cannot 

 be too grateful, wrote of him : "This student has a marked superi- 

 ority over all his schoolmates. He works only at the highest parts 

 of mathematics/' You see the whole difference. Kind Mr. Richard 

 did not complain that Evariste neglected his regular tasks, and, I 

 imagine, often forgot to do the petty mathematical exercises which 

 are indispensable to drill the average boy; he does not think it fair 

 to insist on what Evariste does not do, but states what he does do : 

 he is only concerned with the highest parts of mathematics. Unfor- 

 tunately, the other teachers were less indulgent. For physics and 

 chemistry, the note often repeated was : "Very absent-minded, no 

 work whatever." 



To show the sort of preoccupations which engrossed his mind: 

 at the age of sixteen he believed that he had found a method of 

 solving general equations of the fifth degree. One knows that be- 

 fore succeeding in proving the impossibility of such resolution, 

 Abel had made the same mistake. Besides, Galois was already try- 

 ing to realize the great dream of his boyhood : to enter the Ecole 

 Polytechnique. He was bold enough to prepare himself alone for 

 the entrance examination as early as 1 828 — but failed. This failure 

 was very bitter to him — the more so that he considered it as un- 



