During the five years that he is attached to various regiments, the staff-lieutenant has to prepare and transmit regularly to his own corps, maps, papers, drawings, and surveys, which he is ordered to employ his time upon. My friend, Louis de Bonfils, after leaving the staff-college, was attached for two years to a regiment of infantry in Algiers, after which, he passed a like term with a cavalry corps in France, and then was ordered again to Algiers with a battery of artillery. Having completed his ten years’ military education--viz., three at the College of St. Cyr, two at the staff school, and five attached to regiments of the three arms of the service, Captain de Bonfils commenced his career as a full-blown staff-officer: that is to say, he joined his corps with the rank of captain, and was then eligible for such appointments as officers of his grade can hold. It is from this class--and from this only--that the aides-de-camp of French general officers are selected, and it is amongst the captains of the corps d’état-major, that my friend de Bonfils takes his place. The French staff is not divided, like that of England, into two separate departments of adjutant-general and quarter-master-general. With our neighbours, these form one and the same staff, and every officer belonging to the staff corps is perfectly qualified to fulfil all duties relating to both departments. Nothing whatever is left to chance, or to the hazard of personal selection. The marshals of France alone, have the right to nominate their own aides-de-camp--each having two, one a colonel, the other a lieutenant-colonel of the corps d’état-major. All other officers who are entitled to aides-de-camp must take such as are nominated to their staff by the minister of war; and to ask for a friend or relative being appointed, would in France be thought an unsoldierlike and unpardonable liberty. Louis de Bonfils tells me that in about a year’s time he expects to be promoted to the rank of chef d’escadron in the staff corps, and that he will then probably be sent either to one of the bureaux d’État-Major, which are attached to the various military divisions of France, or to the staff of some general in the Crimea. As I mentioned before, the Corps d’État-Major consists of one hundred lieutenants (who are attached to various regiments of infantry, cavalry, and artillery), three hundred captains, one hundred chefs d’escadron (or majors), thirty lieutenant-colonels, and thirty colonels; so that, without counting the junior rank, here is always in France an effective body of four hundred and sixty officers who have received the most finished military education it is possible to attain in the world, and who are always ready to fill up vacancies in the higher departments, or to form a staff for an army taking the field.