all the coaches you have met in the course of the day, but you hear them, you do not see the figures. This is one of the most remarkable peculiarities of your brain, and I venture to note it because I have the unanimous testimony for it of those who know you most intimately. At the lycée of Nancy, you were superior to your comrades in every branch, and you seemed so well endowed for literary studies that one of your teachers, who is one of our best historians, would have been glad to attract you to our speciality; but when, in the fourth grade, you opened a text on geometry, the work was done. Your astonished teacher rushed to your mother and said to her: "Madam, your son will be a mathematician." And she was not particularly frightened. Mathematics, as soon as you made her acquaintance, seized you and held you. She is a tenacious mistress, with this peculiarity, that she fires all her lovers with the same impulse: the mathematician is a peripatetic. Pedestrian exercise seems necessary to him in order to stimulate thought, and, as he walks, certain mechanical gestures with which he occupies his fingers seem the indispensable auxiliaries of an intellectual labor that leaves him indifferent to the exterior world and even unconscious of it. One day, when promenading, you suddenly discovered that you were carrying in your hand a wicker cage. You were prodigiously surprised. When, where, how had your hand plucked this cage, which was new and fortunately empty? You had no idea, and retracing your steps, you walked until you found on the sidewalk the stock of a basket-maker whom you had innocently despoiled. Such phenomena are very common with you; they will become, if they are not already so, as celebrated as those attributed to Lagrange, to Kant, to Ampere. You might be in worse company.
You were, nevertheless, at times, a child who liked pleasure and games, but you invented your own amusements. You played at railroad or diligence with a map or a guide in reach, and thus you learned geography. You put history into dramas and comedies; at sixteen years you had written a five-act tragedy in verse, and you would not have been a son of Lorraine if the heroine had not been Joan of Arc. Even charades had a charm for you. Are they not problems? The war interrupted these games. You were sixteen years old; your age and your health prevented your mingling with the combatants, but you tried to make yourself useful; every day you accompanied your father to the hospital and served as his secretary; you were so eager to learn the news that, in order to read them in the only papers that were accessible to you, you learned German. The war must have matured you; it certainly left its trace upon you; but it did not change your life. To the men of the generation preceding yours, it brought a definite conversion with introspection. You have read Sully-Prudhomme's verses entitled "Repentance." In them he confesses the error into which the generosity of his heart had drawn him and in which the fal-
