The enclosed letter was as follows:—­

To Monsieur Grossetete: 

Monsieur,—­You have been to me a father when you might have been only a mere protector, and therefore I venture to make you a rather sad confidence.  It is to you alone, you who have made me what I am, that I can tell my troubles.

I am afflicted with a terrible malady, a cruel moral malady.  In my soul are feelings and in my mind convictions which make me utterly unfit for what the State and society demand of me.  This may seem to you ingratitude; it is only the statement of a condition.  When I was twelve years old you, my generous god-father, saw in me, the son of a mere workman, an aptitude for the exact sciences and a precocious desire to rise in life.  You favored my impulse toward better things when my natural fate was to stay a carpenter like my father, who, poor man, did not live long enough to enjoy my advancement.  Indeed, monsieur, you did a good thing, and there is never a day that I do not bless you for it.  It may be that I am now to blame; but whether I am right or wrong it is very certain that I suffer.  In making my complaint to you I feel that I take you as my judge like God Himself.  Will you listen to my story and grant me your indulgence?

Between sixteen and eighteen years of age I gave myself to the study of the exact sciences with an ardor, you remember, that made me ill.  My future depended on my admission to the Ecole Polytechnique.  At that time my studies overworked my brain, and I came near dying; I studied night and day; I did more than the nature of my organs permitted.  I wanted to pass such satisfying examinations that my place in the Ecole would be not only secure, but sufficiently advanced to release me from the cost of my support, which I did not want you to pay any longer.

I triumphed!  I tremble to-day as I think of the frightful conscription (if I may so call it) of brains delivered over yearly to the State by family ambition.  By insisting on these severe studies at the moment when a youth attains his various forms of growth, the authorities produce secret evils and kill by midnight study many precious faculties which later would have developed both strength and grandeur.  The laws of nature are relentless; they do not yield in any particular to the enterprises or the wishes of society.  In the moral order as in the natural order all abuses must be paid for; fruits forced in a hot-house are produced at the tree’s expense and often at the sacrifice of the goodness of its product.  La Quintinie killed the orange-trees to give Louis XIV. a bunch of flowers every day at all seasons.  So it is with intellects.  The strain upon adolescent brains discounts their future.

That which is chiefly wanting to our epoch is legislative genius.  Europe has had no true legislators since Jesus Christ, who, not having given to the world a political code, left his work