Those who succeed in the examination and are admitted, take an engagement to serve seven years either in the cavalry or infantry, and are thus under the obligation, if they are judged incompetent at the close of their two years’ stay at the school to receive a commission, to enter and serve as common soldiers. The two years of their stay at the school counts as a part of their service. It is only in the special case of loss of time caused by illness, that permission is given to remain a third year. The ordinary payment is 60_l._ (1,500 francs) per annum. All whose inability to pay this amount is satisfactorily established, may claim, as at the Polytechnic, an allowance of the whole or of half of the expenses from the State, to which may be added an allowance for the whole or for a portion of the outfit (from 24_l._ to 28_l._) These _bourses_ or _demi-bourses_, with the _trousseau_, or _demi-trousseau_, have during the last few years been granted unsparingly. One-third of the 800 young men at the school in February 1856 were _boursiers_ or _demi-boursiers_. Candidates admitted from the Orphan School of La Flèche, where the sons of officers wounded or killed in service receive a gratuitous education, are maintained in the same manner here.[16] [Footnote 16: About twenty-five are sent every year from La Flèche. The admissions from the army (_i.e._, of soldiers between twenty and twenty-five years old) do not amount to more than four or at the utmost five per cent. They are very frequently young men who have previously failed for St. Cyr, and who then enter the army as privates, and come in as such. They have to pass the same examination.] It was the rule till lately that cadets appointed, on leaving St. Cyr, to the cavalry should be placed for two years at the Cavalry School at Saumur. This, however, has recently been changed; on entering St. Cyr those who desire appointments in the cavalry declare their wishes, and are put at once through a course of training in horsemanship. Those who are found unfit are quickly withdrawn; the remainder, if their place on the final examination allows of their appointment to the cavalry, are by that time sufficiently well practiced to be able to join their regiments at once. Twenty-seven, or sometimes a greater number, are annually at the close of their second year of study placed in competition with twenty-five candidates from the second lieutenants belonging to the army,[17] if so many are forthcoming, for admission to the Staff School at Paris. This advantage is one object which serves as a stimulus to exertion, the permission being given according to rank in the classification by order of merit.