POINCARE AND THE FRENCH ACADEMY 271 



lacious discourses of the rhetoricians had maintained him; in order to 

 carry out designs which were unworthy and shameful, these gentry re- 

 sort to sonorous words to lull a careless people to security; and when 

 the nation awakens and finds herself rolling into the abyss, she cries out 

 treason but is unable to distinguish the traitors. So Sully-Prudhomme 

 had detested war and shown himself rather disdainful of soldiers. 

 Then he learned from his own experience that any one who chooses can 

 not be a soldier, that it is one thing to deliver philosophic harangues 

 and another to submit one's physical and moral being to monotonous 

 regulations and entire self-effacement; he learned — and the lesson cost 

 him dear — that in order to possess the right to think, one must have 

 conquered first the right to live ; that it is folly which would be ridicu- 

 lous if it did not bring such despair to profess humanitarianism when 

 all of Europe is under arms; and that, however inelegant the solution 

 may appear, there is but one, if a people intends to maintain its na- 

 tionality, guard its independence, continue its race, possess its territory, 

 speak its language — and the solution is to be strong enough to defend 

 them. 



You lived your life, sir, under the yoke of the victorious enemy. 

 It was in a city occupied by the Germans that you resumed and con- 

 tinued your studies. You were thoroughly successful in them; but the 

 joy was doubled for you by the fact that your public success coincided 

 with the evacuation of Nancy. As our dear late colleague Emile Geb- 

 hart has told us, it was in a hall filled with the joy of deliverance that 

 you received your last scholastic honors. You held the first rank, a na- 

 tive of the city and ten times a prize-winner. You carried off the prize 

 in mathematics from all your rivals, from Paris and the departments; 

 it depended on you alone to enter the School of Forestry second on the 

 list of appointees; this would have been another glory for Nancy, but 

 you refused to go further with the school than to leave your visiting- 

 card; you were distrustful of the fallacious dryads who delight in 

 troubling the absent-minded. 



The next year you presented yourself as a candidate at the Ecole 

 Polytechnique and at the same time at the Ecole ISTormale ; for the latter 

 you stood number five, for the former number one. Which of the two 

 great schools would you choose ? That which decided your choice, more 

 even than the familiar memories, than the temptation of the uniform 

 and the glory of the sergeant-major's chevrons, was it not, tell us, the 

 groaning of the mutilated fatherland ? But you never reached the point 

 of entering upon a military career. Your scientific bent showed itself so 

 brilliantly at the school that there was no question of another sort of 

 glory ; your residence there is a matter of piously transmitted tradition. 

 It is related that you attended your classes, at least in mathematics, 

 without taking a note, without reading or even collecting the mimeo- 

 graphed sheets which reproduce the professor's lecture. Your method 



