Works of Honore De Balzac

by Honoré de Balzac

  produce great changes in the present social order by judiciously

  guiding the working-classes. What are we now but workers without

  work, tools on the shelves of a shop? We are trained and organized

  as if to move the world, and nothing is given us to do. I feel

  within me some great thing, which is decreasing daily, and will

  soon vanish; I tell you so with mathematical frankness. Before

  making the change I want your advice; I look upon myself as your

  child, and I will never take any important step without consulting

  you, for your experience is equal to your kindness.

  I know very well that the State, after obtaining a class of

  trained men, cannot undertake for them alone great public works;

  there are not three hundred bridges needed a year in all France;

  the State can no more build great buildings for the fame of its

  engineers than it can declare war merely to win battles and bring

  to the front great generals; but, then, as men of genius have

  never failed to present themselves when the occasion called for

  them, springing from the crowd like Vauban, can there be any

  greater proof of the uselessness of the present institution? Can’t

  they see that when they have stimulated a man of talent by all

  those preparations he will make a fierce struggle before he allows

  himself to become a nonentity? Is this good policy on the part of

  the State? On the contrary, is not the State lighting the fire of

  ardent ambitions, which must find fuel somewhere.

  Among the six hundred young men whom they put forth every year

  there are exceptions, — men who resist what may be called their

  demonetization. I know some myself, and if I could tell you their

  struggles with men and things when armed with useful projects and

  conceptions which might bring life and prosperity to the half-dead

  provinces where the State has sent them, you would feel that a man

  of power, a man of talent, a man whose nature is a miracle, is a

  hundredfold more unfortunate and more to be pitied than the man

  whose lower nature lets him submit to the shrinkage of his

  faculties.

  I have made up my mind, therefore, that I would rather direct some

  commercial or industrial enterprise, and live on small means while

  trying to solve some of the great problems still unknown to

  industry and to society, than remain at my present post.

  You will tell me, perhaps, that nothing hinders me from employing

  the leisure that I certainly have in using my intellectual powers

  and seeking in the stillness of this commonplace life the solution

  of some problem useful to humanity. Ah! monsieur, don’t you know

  the influence of the provinces, — the relaxing effect of a life

  just busy enough to waste time on futile labor, and not enough to

  use the rich resources our education has given us? Don’t think me,

  my dear protector, eaten up by the desire to make a fortune, nor

  even by an insensate desire for fame. I am too much of a

  calculator not to know the nothingness of glory. Neither do I want

  to marry; seeing the fate now before me, I think my existence a

  melancholy gift to offer any woman. As for money, though I regard

  it as one of the most powerful means given to social man to act

  with, it is, after all, but a means.

  I place my whole desire and happiness on the hope of being useful

  to my country. My greatest pleasure would be to work in some

  situation suited to my faculties. If in your region, or in the

  circle of your acquaintances, you should hear of any enterprise

  that needed the capacities you know me to possess, think of me; I

  will wait six months for your answer before taking any step.

  What I have written here, dear sir and friend, others think. I

  have seen many of my classmates or older graduates caught like me

  in the toils of some specialty, — geographical engineers,

  captain-professors, captains of engineers, who will remain captains

  all their lives, and now bitterly regret they did not enter active

  service with the army. Reflecting on these miserable results, I

  ask myself the following questions, and I would like your opinion

  on them, assuring you that they are the fruit of long meditation,

  clarified in the fires of suffering: —

  What is the real object of the State? Does it truly seek to obtain

  fine capacities? The system now pursued directly defeats that end;

  it has crated the most thorough mediocrities that any government

  hostile to superiority could desire. Does it wish to give a career

  to its choice minds? As a matter of fact, it affords them the

  meanest opportunities; there is not a man who has issued from the

  Ecoles who does not bitterly regret, when he gets to be fifty or

  sixty years of age, that he ever fell into the trap set for him by

  the promises of the State. Does it seek to obtain men of genius?

  What man of genius, what great talent have the schools produced

  since 1790? If it had not been for Napoleon would Cachin, the man

  of genius to whom France owes Cherbourg, have existed? Imperial

  despotism brought him forward; the constitutional regime would

  have smothered him. How many men from the Ecoles are to be found

  in the Academy of Sciences? Possibly two or three. The man of

  genius develops always outside of the technical schools. In the

  sciences which those schools teach genius obeys only its own laws;

  it will not develop except under conditions which man cannot

  control; neither the State nor the science of mankind,

  anthropology, understands them. Riquet, Perronet, Leonardo da

  Vinci, Cachin, Palladio, Brunelleschi, Michel-Angelo, Bramante,

  Vauban, Vicat, derive their genius from causes unobserved and

  preparatory, which we call chance, — the pet word of fools. Never,

  with or without schools, are mighty workmen such as these wanting

  to their epoch.

  Now comes the question, Does the State gain through these

  institutions the better doing of its works of public utility, or

  the cheaper doing of them? As for that, I answer that private

  enterprises of a like kind get on very well without the help of

  our engineers; and next, the government works are the most

  extravagant in the world, and the additional cost of the vast

  administrative staff of the Ponts et Chaussees is immense. In

  all other countries, in Germany, England, Italy, where

  institutions like ours do not exist, works of this character are

  better done and far less costly than in France. Those three

  nations are remarkable for new and useful inventions in this line.

  I know it is the fashion to say, in speaking of our Ecoles, that

  all Europe envies them; but for the last fifteen years Europe,

  which closely observes us, has not established others like them.

  England, that clever calculator, has better schools among her

  working population, from which come practical men who show their

  genius the moment they rise from practice to theory. Stephenson

  and MacAdam did not come from schools like ours.

  But what is the good of talking? When a few young and able

  engineers, full of ardor,
solve, at the outset of their career,

  the problem of maintaining the roads of France, which need some

  hundred millions spent upon them every quarter of a century (and

  which are now in a pitiable state), they gain nothing by making

  known in reports and memoranda their intelligent knowledge; it is

  immediately engulfed in the archives of the general Direction, —

  that Parisian centre where everything enters and nothing issues;

  where old men are jealous of young ones, and all the posts of

  management are used to shelve old officers or men who have

  blundered.

  This is why, with a body of scientific men spread all over the

  face of France and constituting a part of the administration, — a

  body which ought to enlighten every region on the subject of its

  resources, — this is why we are still discussing the practicability

  of railroads while other countries are making theirs. If ever

  France was to show the excellence of her institution of technical

  schools, it should have been in this magnificent phase of public

  works, which is destined to change the face of States and nations,

  to double human life, and modify the laws of space and time.

  Belgium, the United States of America, England, none of whom have

  an Ecole Polytechnique, will be honeycombed with railroads when

  French engineers are still surveying ours, and selfish interests,

  hidden behind all projects, are hindering their execution.

  Thus I say that as for the State, it derives no benefit from its

  technical schools; as for the individual pupil of those schools,

  his earnings are poor, his ambition crushed, and his life a cruel

  deception. Most assuredly the powers he has displayed between

  sixteen and twenty-six years of age would, if he had been cast

  upon his own resources, have brought him more fame and more wealth

  than the government in whom he trusted will ever give him. As a

  commercial man, a learned man, a military man, this choice

  intellect would have worked in a vast centre where his precious

  faculties and his ardent ambition would not be idiotically and

  prematurely repressed.

  Where, then, is progress? Man and State are both kept backward by

  this system. Does not the experience of a whole generation demand

  a reform in the practical working of these institutions? The duty

  of culling from all France during each generation the choice minds

  destined to become the learned and the scientific of the nation is

  a sacred office, the priests of which, the arbiters of so many

  fates, should be trained by special study. Mathematical knowledge

  is perhaps less necessary to them than physiological knowledge.

  And do you not think that they need a little of that second-sight

  which is the witchcraft of great men? As it is, the examiners are

  former professors, honorable men grown old in harness, who limit

  their work to selecting the best themes. They are unable to do

  what is really demanded of them; and yet their functions are the

  noblest in the State and demand extraordinary men.

  Do not think, dear sir and friend, that I blame only the Ecole

  itself; no, I blame the system by which it is recruited. This

  system is the concours, competition, — a modern invention,

  essentially bad; bad not only in science, but wherever it is

  employed, in arts, in all selections of men, of projects, of

  things. If it is a reproach to our great Ecoles that they have not

  produced men superior to other educational establishments, it is

  still more shameful that the grand prix of the Institute has not

  as yet furnished a single great painter, great musician, great

  architect, great sculptor; just as the suffrage for the last

  twenty years has not elected out of its tide of mediocrities a

  single great statesman. My observation makes me detect, as I

  think, an error which vitiates in France both education and

  politics. It is a cruel error, and it rests on the following

  principle, which organizers have misconceived: —

  Nothing, either in experience or in the nature of things, can

  give a certainty that the intellectual qualities of the adult

  youth will be those of the mature man.

  At this moment I am intimate with a number of distinguished men

  who concern themselves with all the moral maladies which are now

  afflicting France. They see, as I do, that our highest education

  is manufacturing temporary capacities, — temporary because they

  are without exercise and without future; that such education is

  without profit to the State because it is devoid of the vigor of

  belief and feeling. Our whole system of public education needs

  overhauling, and the work should be presided over by some man of

  great knowledge, powerful will, and gifted with that legislative

  genius which has never been met with among moderns, except perhaps

  in Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

  Possibly our superfluous numbers might be employed in giving

  elementary instruction so much needed by the people. The

  deplorable amount of crime and misdemeanors shows a social disease

  directly arising from the half-education given the masses, which

  tends to the destruction of social ties by making the people

  reflect just enough to desert the religious beliefs which are

  favorable to social order, and not enough to lift them to the

  theory of obedience and duty, which is the highest reach of the

  new transcendental philosophy. But as it is impossible to make a

  whole nation study Kant, therefore I say fixed beliefs and habits

  are safer for the masses than shallow studies and reasoning.

  If I had my life to begin over again, perhaps I would enter a

  seminary and become a simple village priest, or the teacher of a

  country district. But I am too far advanced in my profession now

  to be a mere primary instructor; I can, if I leave my present

  post, act in a wider range than that of a school or a country

  parish. The Saint-Simonians, to whom I have been tempted to ally

  myself, want now to take a course in which I cannot follow them.

  Nevertheless, in spite of their mistakes, they have touched on

  many of the sore spots which are the fruits of our present

  legislation, and which the State will only doctor by insufficient

  palliatives, — merely delaying in France the moral and political

  crisis that must come.

  Adieu, dear Monsieur Grossetete; accept the assurance of my

  respectful attachment, which, notwithstanding all these

  observations, can only increase.

  Gregoire Gerard.

  According to his old habit as a banker, Grossetete had jotted down his reply on the back of the letter itself, heading it with the sacramental word, Answered.

  It is useless, my dear Gerard, to discuss the observations made in

  your letter, because by a trick of chance (I use the term which

  is, as you say, the pet word of fools) I have a proposal to make

  to you which may result in withdrawing you from the situation you

  find so bad. Madame Graslin, the owner of the forests of Montegnac

  and of a barren plateau extending from the base of a chain of

  mountains on which are the fore
sts, wishes to improve this vast

  domain, to clear her timber properly, and cultivate the stony

  plain.

  To put this project into execution she needs a man of your

  scientific knowledge and ardor, and one who has also your

  disinterested devotion and your ideas of practical utility. It

  will be little money and much work! a great result from small

  means! a whole region to be changed fundamentally! barren places

  to be made to gush with plenty! Isn’t that precisely what you

  want, — you who are dreaming of constructing a poem? From the tone

  of sincerity which pervades your letter, I do not hesitate to bid

  you come and see me at Limoges. But, my good friend, don’t send in

  your resignation yet; get leave of absence only, and tell your

  administration that you are going to study questions connected

  with your profession outside of the government works. In this way,

  you will not lose your rights, and you will have time to judge for

  yourself whether the project conceived by the rector of Montegnac

  and approved by Madame Graslin is feasible.

  I will explain to you by word of mouth the advantages you will

  find in case this great scheme can be carried out. Rely on the

  friendship of

  Yours, etc, T. Grossetete.

  Madame Graslin replied to Grossetete in few words: “Thank you, my friend; I shall expect your protege.” She showed the letter to the rector, saying, —

  “One more wounded man for the hospital.”

  The rector read the letter, reread it, made two or three turns on the terrace silently; then he gave it back to Madame Graslin, saying, —

  “A fine soul, and a superior man. He says the schools invented by the genius of the Revolution manufacture incapacities. For my part, I say they manufacture unbelievers; for if Monsieur Gerard is not an atheist, he is a protestant.”

  “We will ask him,” she said, struck by an answer.

  XVII. THE REVOLUTION OF JULY JUDGED AT MONTEGNAC

  A fortnight later, in December, and in spite of the cold, Monsieur Grossetete came to the chateau de Montegnac, to “present his protege,” whom Veronique and Monsieur Bonnet were impatiently awaiting.