as Leonardo da Vinci knew how to build,—­mechanician, architect, painter, inventor of hydraulics, indefatigable constructor of canals that he was?

Trained from their earliest years to the baldness of axiom and formula, the youths who leave the Ecole have lost the sense of elegance and ornament; a column seems to them useless; they return to the point where art begins, and cling to the useful.

But all this is nothing in comparison to the real malady which is undermining me.  I feel an awful transformation going on within me; I am conscious that my powers and my faculties, formerly unnaturally taxed, are giving way.  I am letting the prosaic influence of my life get hold of me.  I who, by the very nature of my efforts, looked to do some great thing, I am face to face with none but petty ones; I measure stones, I inspect roads, I have not enough to really occupy me for two hours in my day.  I see my colleagues marry, and fall into a situation contrary to the spirit of modern society.  I wanted to be useful to my country.  Is my ambition an unreasonable one?  The country asked me to put forth all my powers; it told me to become a representative of science; yet here I am with folded arms in the depths of the provinces.  I am not even allowed to leave the locality in which I am penned, to exercise my faculties in planning useful enterprises.  A hidden but very real disfavor is the certain reward of any one of us who yields to an inspiration and goes beyond the special service laid down for him.

No, the favor a superior man has to hope for in that case is that his talent and his presumption may not be noticed, and that his project may be buried in the archives of the administration.  What think you will be the reward of Vicat, the one among us who has brought about the only real progress in the practical science of construction?  The Council-general of the Ponts et Chaussees, composed in part of men worn-out by long and sometimes honorable service, but whose only remaining force is for negation, and who set aside everything they no longer comprehend, is the extinguisher used to snuff out the projects of audacious spirits.  This Council seems to have been created to paralyze the arm of that glorious youth of France, which asks only to work and to be useful to its country.

Monstrous things are done in Paris.  The future of a province depends on the mere signature of men who (through intrigues I have no time to explain to you) often stop the execution of useful and much-needed work; in fact, the best plans are often those which offer most to the cupidity of commercial companies or speculators.

Another five years and I shall no longer be myself; my ambition will be quenched, my desire to use the faculties my country ordered me to exercise gone forever; the faculties themselves are rusting out in the miserable corner of the world in which I