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the great Ecole Polytechnique, the highest mathematical school in France. With sudden boldness and excitement, he began to prepare himself for the entrance examinations.

Originality has little to do with an expected answer in the minds of examiners. But when Evariste failed, with the sense of what he had done under the pressure of examination still with him, it all seemed wrong. Did he know he was brushed aside somehow by the natural power of what he had created upon the paper? But he had failed, he knew that, and worked on.

His first paper came into print when he was eighteen, and the strength of seeing it in type thrilled him to a great, almost clairvoyant state of mind, in which he set down only the uttermost reaches of his thought, and made of these a first direct communication to the Académie des Sciences. By official carelessness, this was lost at the Académie, and this bitter fact had but a short separate existence of its own, for he failed again at the examinations for the Polytechnique.

In July of this same year, the wit and charm of the elder Galois bent, stumbled, and ended. The liberal mayor had taken his life in a small apartment not far from the college, fatally wounded first by the vicious and snarling gossip against him, that was at bottom no more than a grimace of politics.

This cut Evariste. His father had been one in his mind who could hold his independence with graciousness and humor. To see him end, not only made a vacancy in his memory, but undermined all he thought was sure itself, and made him view with more apprehension the strength of the wild fates whose thing he was.

The young Galois entered the Ecole Normale, which was then without that absorption the Polytechnique might have been able to give his genius; an institution dead in its study, as it was safe in its politics. When the three glorious days of the July rebellion came, the students of the Ecole Normale were shut within doors, while those of the Polytechnique were swiftly offered to the fray. Galois watched this with a clear eye, and contained himself until the opportunist director of the Ecole Normale, after the days were over and the provisional government in control, then placed his students at the disposal of the

new powers. His remarks knew no bounds, and he ended a quarrel with the director by publishing a letter which criticized the multiplicity of attitude the director was able to assume. Meanwhile disillusion over the results of the successful revolution had done their part to dishearten him. He was dismissed from the school, as soon as the director understood the letter.

All this produced in him activity instead of contemplation of his injustices; not nobly, but as naturally as he had found the meaning freedom had for him when he left his mother for college. Evariste feverishly embellished and ornamented the infinity of his second lost memoir-he had sent it to the secretary of the Académie a day or so before his, the secretary's, death, and it was not noticed in his papers. In a few months it was again in official hands. The concision of his ornament was not, however, in the direction of clarity. It seemed a dilution to append vast notes, and a trade, a trick for favor, which both his pride and his speed forbade.

It was returned to him as incomprehensible.

There remained the political turmoil, and at this pitch, Evariste shot toward it. Aflame with passion one night he rose from a dinner table with his glass in one hand and a knife in the other to propose a toast. "To Louis Philippe!" he cried. "To the King!"

This marked him as a dangerous person; his arrest culminated in release, and then in arrest again. His body was beginning to wear through as the container for his force, and he was finally removed to a convalescent home in Paris, ill with fever.

Octavius could not go on; his voice stopped without explanation. It seemed to me a long time, for in its space, this mountain stream that was life in Evariste Galois, had slowly lost speed, and gathered, in a pool. And in that pool I beheld an eternal and beautiful idea.

I knew, in a very humble way, what mathematics does for the scientist: creatively, it gives him numerical order for his predictions. I knew this because, from the measurement of my angle with a star, I have been able to know precisely where I was in an immensity of an extending ocean.

In a way almost peculiar to the artist, it was the projection of himself Evariste sought to find by his mathematics.

A shot is fired from a gun, and we can predict before it is fired where its flight will end. And when it ends at the predicted point, we really find ourselves again, the projection of ourselves. This tender life of Evariste was ever a projection of itself, leaping ahead-to find itself, the mind in the form of a mountain stream. And here it took on the calm of a pool, here in the silence.

The idea of a student was radiant with this new beauty the pool gave me. Evariste, all students,-they were ever embracing the projection of themselves, the completion of themselves. They were lovers. This, then, was the necessity, the hurt, the eternal beauty I had so felt in Evariste.

Just as water may be flowing on from a pool without at first securing the attention, so Octavius had been speaking again for some moments before I heard his voice.

It was a fever. Evariste was ill with a fever, and a prisoner. Cholera was raging in Paris, and, in some way I had not caught, this had become the excuse for Evariste's release on parole.

He had freedom again, as far as men can give such a soul a freedom. His vitality seized it, caught it up in a new flame.

He spent this freedom in striking out against a new surface. Woman came to him, and his first love-a prostitute. He furiously drained this goblet, and wrote to a friend he had exhausted it, without joy, without hope, certain it was his last. He felt his work was through, his heart revolt against his head, and said he would do no more. It did not seem a pity to him.

Four days passed after the end of this realization, and he found himself engaged in a duel with two friends of the girl he had loved. The connection between the girl and the duel was apparently remote, and in truth it might be taken for an accident, were it not for the fact that things remote, in an intense atmosphere, couple with flashing immediacy.

He was shot in the stomach. His weakened body, fanned by the struggle against extinction, gave a last heat to his mind. Before the duel, he set down the main discoveries he had made. They were of the character of a child, informed that parallel lines met at infinity, contemplating what happened at that intersection. He waved aside the priest, and while his body

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struggled against peritonitis, in his mind these things he had set down gave his mind its final wrench, its last leap for completion, and he died. . . .

Down into the valley my eyes suddenly swept, as Octavius's voice ceased. As though I would find Evariste there. The sense I had of him was immediate. He could have touched me, and I have answered, quickly, without wonder.

For there is a special necessity about a student that is close and familiar to all living. He is a lover. He is attached to an image, that image which as in the pool in Evariste receives its hurt, as well as a beauty of inevitable need and completion.

ALFRED STANFORD.

BASQUE TOWNS

BY WALDO FRANK

IN the north of Spain, where the Cantabrian ranges and the Pyrenees rim the Bay of Biscay, lives a peculiar people. Even its land is different from Spain's. The air is temperate and moist. Mountains are clad in forests of oak and pine. Fields of high grass bring to the vales a honied redolence. The peaks are massed on green plateaux above the sea, like low stretches of the Alps brought to the Spanish coast. The land is spotted with stone towns. The houses are gabled, the narrow streets are cobbled: there is a note of sober canniness and of seclusion. These are the towns of the Basque.

When the Romans made a province of Iberia, the Basque lived unconcerned. When the Moslem swept north in the eighth century, the Basque withdrew into the mountains and withstood him. When the Visigoth came down through the passes of the Pyrenees, the Basque stood aside and let him go. When Roland with the troop of Charlemagne followed the Visigoth, the Basque beat him at Roncesvalles. When, finally, the kings of Castile, having cleared the Moor and the Jew from Spain, turned back to subdue the Basque, he submitted only as a vassal bowing the head to a more powerful alien. By decree, Ferdinand VI ennobled all the Basques of the Province of Vizcaya: already, in 1200, the entire population of the Province of Guipúzcoa had been declared hidalgoes.

An indelible people! The Basques seem even to be a race in an exploded, archaic fashion: a race by blood. Spaniards, Chinese, Frenchmen, Jews, are races by culture. But the Basques appear to have had no culture. Their language was unwritten. They possessed no history, no social records. They had no underlying base of ethics, or of religion. If they possessed a culture, it was almost biologic. It persisted in blood, in instinct, rather than in conscious concept. A certain haleness of self-sufficiency, a certain

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