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.

There are nearly four hundred engineers-in-ordinary and pupil engineers; and as there are not more than a hundred or so of engineers-in-chief, only a limited number of the sub-engineers can hope to rise.  Besides, above the grade of engineer-in-chief, there is no absorbent class; for we cannot count as a means of absorption the ten or fifteen places of inspector-generals or divisionaries,—­posts that are almost as useless in our corps as colonels are in the artillery, where the battery is the essential thing.  The engineer-in-ordinary, like the captain of artillery, knows the whole science.  He ought not to have any one over him except an administrative head to whom no more than eighty-six engineers should report,—­for one engineer, with two assistants is enough for a department.

The present hierarchy in these bodies results in the subordination of active energetic capacities to the worn-out capacities of old men, who, thinking they know best, alter or nullify the plans submitted by their subordinates,—­perhaps with the sole aim of making their existence felt; for that seems to me the only influence exercised over the public works of France by the Council-general of the Ponts et Chaussees.

Suppose, however, that I become, between thirty and forty years of age, an engineer of the first-class and an engineer-in-chief before I am fifty.  Alas!  I see my future; it is written before my eyes.  Here is a forecast of it:—­

My present engineer-in-chief is sixty years old; he issued with honors, as I did, from the famous Ecole; he has turned gray doing in two departments what I am doing now, and he has become the most ordinary man it is possible to imagine; he has fallen from the height to which he had really