s appointed to the task of instruction
the formal promise never to recite any lectures which they might have
learned by heart. From that time the chair has become a tribune where
the professor, identified, so to speak, with his audience, sees in
their looks, in their gestures, in their countenance, sometimes the
necessity for proceeding at greater speed, sometimes, on the contrary,
the necessity of retracing his steps, of awakening the attention by some
incidental observations, of clothing in a new form the thought which,
when first expressed, had left some doubts in the minds of his audience.
And do not suppose that the beautiful impromptu lectures with which the
amphitheatre of the Normal School resounded, remained unknown to the
public. Short-hand writers paid by the State reported them. The sheets,
after being revised by the professors, were sent to the fifteen hundred
pupils, to the members of Convention, to the consuls and agents of the
Republic in foreign countries, to all governors of districts. There was
in this something certainly of profusion compared with the parsimonious
and mean habits of our time. Nobody, however, would concur in this
reproach, however slight it may appear, if I were permitted to point out
in this very apartment an illustrious Academician, whose mathematical
genius was awakened by the lectures of the Normal School in an obscure
district town!

The necessity of demonstrating the important services, ignored in the
present day, for which the dissemination of the sciences is indebted to
the first Normal School, has induced me to dwell at greater length on
the subject than I intended. I hope to be pardoned; the example in any
case will not be contagious. Eulogiums of the past, you know, Gentlemen,
are no longer fashionable. Every thing which is said, every thing which
is printed, induces us to suppose that the world is the creation of
yesterday. This opinion, which allows to each a part more or less
brilliant in the cosmogonic drama, is under the safeguard of too many
vanities to have any thing to fear from the efforts of logic.

I have already stated that the brilliant success of Fourier at the
Normal School assigned to him a distinguished place among the persons
whom nature has endowed in the highest degree with the talent of public
tuition. Accordingly, he was not forgotten by the founders of the
Polytechnic School. Attached to that celebrated establishment, first
with the title of Superin