EVARISTE GALOIS 



97 



fied — came and stayed with him, and as he was crying, Evariste 

 tried to console him, saying: "Do not cry. I need all my courage 

 to die at twenty/' While still fully conscious, he refused the as- 

 sistance of a priest. In the evening peritonitis declared itself and 

 he breathed his last at ten o'clock on the following morning. 



His funeral, which strangely recalled that of his father, was at- 

 tended by two to three thousand republicans, including deputa- 

 tions from various schools, and by a large number of police, for 

 trouble was expected. But everything went off very calmly. Of 

 course it was the patriot and the lover of freedom whom all these 

 people meant to honor; little did they know that a day would 

 come when this young political hero would be hailed as one of 

 the greatest mathematicians of all time. 



A life as short yet as full as the life of Galois is interesting not 

 simply in itself but even more perhaps because of the light it 

 throws upon the nature of genius. When a great work is the nat- 

 ural culmination of a long existence devoted to one persistent 

 endeavor, it is sometimes difficult to say whether it is the fruit 

 of genius or the fruit of patience. When genius evolves slowly it 

 may be hard to distinguish from talent — but when it explodes 

 suddenly, at the beginning and not at the end of life, or when we 

 are at a loss to explain its intellectual genesis, we can but feel that 

 we are in the sacred presence of something vastly superior to 

 talent. When one is confronted with facts which cannot be ex- 

 plained in the ordinary way, is it not more scientific to admit our 

 ignorance than to hide it behind faked explanations? Of course 

 it is not necessary to introduce any mystical idea, but it is one's 

 duty to acknowledge the mystery. When a work is really the fruit 

 of genius, we cannot conceive that a man of talent might have 

 done it "just as well" by taking the necessary pains. Pains alone 

 will never do; neither is it simply a matter of jumping a little 

 further, for it involves a synthetic process of a higher kind. I do 

 not say that talent and genius are essentially different, but that 

 they are of different orders of magnitude. 



Galois' fateful existence helps one to understand Lowell's say- 



