However, as I say, I triumphed. At twenty-one years of age I knew the mathematical sciences up to the point to which so many men of genius have brought them, and I was impatient to distinguish myself by carrying them further. This desire is so natural that almost every pupil leaving the Ecole fixes his eyes on that moral sun called Fame. The first thought of all is to become another Newton, or Laplace, or Vauban. Such are the efforts that France demands of the young men who leave her celebrated school. Now let us see the fate of these men culled with so much care from each generation. At one-and-twenty we dream of life, and expect marvels of it. I entered the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees; I was a pupil-engineer. I studied the science of construction, and how ardently! I am sure you remember that. I left the school in 1827, being then twenty-four years of age, still only a candidate as engineer, and the government paid me one hundred and fifty francs a month; the commonest book-keeper in Paris earns that by the time he is eighteen, giving little more than four hours a day to his work. By a most unusual piece of luck, perhaps because of the distinction my devoted studies won for me, I was made, in 1828, when I was twenty-five years old, engineer-in-ordinary. I was sent, as you know, to a sub-prefecture, with a salary of twenty-five hundred francs. The question of money is nothing. Certainly my fate has been more brilliant than the son of a carpenter might expect; but where will you find a grocer’s boy, who, if thrown into a shop at sixteen, will not in ten years be on the high-road to an independent property? I learned then to what these terrible efforts of mental power, these gigantic exertions demanded by the State were to lead. The State now employed me to count and measure pavements and heaps of stones on the roadways; I had to keep in order, repair, and sometimes construct culverts, one-arched bridges, regulate drift-ways, clean and sometimes open ditches, lay out bounds, and answer questions about the planting and felling of trees. Such are the principal and sometimes the only occupations of ordinary engineers, together with a little levelling which the government obliges us to do ourselves, though any of our chain-bearers with their limited experience can do it better than we with all our science.