EVARISTE GALOIS 



93 



joined, became more and more disaffected and restless. The di- 

 rector of the Ecole Normale had been obliged to restrain himself 

 considerably to brook Galois' irregular conduct, his 'laziness/* 

 his intractable temper; the boy's political attitude, and chiefly his 

 undisguised contempt for the director's pusillanimity now in- 

 creased the tension between them to the breaking point. The pub- 

 lication in the "Gazette des Ecoles" of a letter of Galois' in which 

 he scornfully criticized the director's tergiversations was but the 

 last of many offenses. On December 9, he was invited to leave the 

 school, and his expulsion was ratified by the Royal Council on 

 January 3, 1831. 



To support himself Galois announced that he would give a pri- 

 vate course on higher algebra in the backshop of a bookseller, Mr. 

 Caillot, 5 rue de la Sorbonne. I do not know whether this course, 

 or how much of it, was actually delivered. A further scientific dis- 

 appointment was reserved for him : a new copy of his second lost 

 memoir had been communicated by him to the Academie; it was 

 returned to him by Poisson, four months later, as being incom- 

 prehensible. There is no doubt that Galois was partly responsible 

 for this, for he had taken no pains to explain himself clearly. 



This was the last straw! Galois' academic career was entirely 

 compromised, the bridges were burned, he plunged himself en- 

 tirely into the political turmoil. He threw himself into it with his 

 habitual fury and the characteristic intransigency of a mathe- 

 matician; there was nothing left to conciliate him, no means to 

 moderate his passion, and he soon reached the extreme limit of 

 exaltation. He is said to have exclaimed : "If a corpse were needed 

 to stir the people up, I would give mine." Thus on May 9, 1831, 

 at the end of a political banquet, being intoxicated — not with wine 

 but with the ardent conversation of an evening — he proposed a 

 sarcastic toast to the King. He held his glass and an open knife in 

 one hand and said simply: "To Louis-Philippe!" Of course he 

 was soon arrested and sent to Ste. Pelagie. The lawyer persuaded 

 him to maintain that he had actually said: "To Louis-Philippe, 

 if he betray/' and many witnesses affirmed that they had heard 



